Be sure to read Pt.1, Pt.2, Pt.3 & Pt.4 first…
Fun & Serious Games
So after that crazy China trip to run a four-player networked racing game on DK1, the popularity of that demo sparked a lot of interest internally, with the client, and then the early VR adopters. Also with a couple of execs looking to get on the VR wave, who wanted to setup a JV to fund and develop the game.
Radial-G was born out of that experience, with an unlimited single player hotlap demo released onto the Oculus Share site for DK1+ owners, a place devs could showcase and highlight game ideas. I miss Oculus Share. SideQuest does a good job but there’s a lot more noise and copycat content these days. I would later find out that the OG Sony Morpheus (what became PlayStation VR) team in London were keeping an analogue lap time flipchart-based leaderboard in their office, manually updating their times from the single player demo.
Thanks to the guy who designed the logo (sorry, it was a long time ago, I’ve forgotten his name now), Radial-G gained the : Racing Revolved suffix. Genius, I doff my cap to you sir. That single player demo launched a KickStarter in 2014, which although ultimately wasn’t successful in reaching its funding target, certainly made the early-adopters and VR press aware of the title in the works. The KickStarter was a lot of work, 24/7 to respond to global backers. I wrote two post-mortem (pt.1 & pt.2) blog posts about it at the time for VRFocus. We did loads of events around it, including the first VR in a Bar where I met Sammy and Bertie of Virtual Umbrella for the first time (this dynamic duo would become regular faces around the studio as we worked with them for PR, marketing and many events over the years).
We also kinda broke the internet when, after having seen Shu arrive at Develop conference in Brighton that year, and tweeting him to come try out the demo, a photo of him playing on DK1 using, (as we all know the only controller that worked at the time,) an Xbox gamepad upset a few Sony fans. Anyway, we got a PS4 and Morpheus dev kit out of it and the road to Sony PlayStation VR was started.
VR dev was hard during the early years — Unity was unstable, SDKs were rough, we had no visibility of when consumer devices would launch. 2014? 2015? 2016? Facebook bought Oculus in 2014, which although is a pretty marmite discussion point, showed that VR was something to be taken seriously and saw many other companies get involved.
We launched the first build of the new-look Radial-G : Racing Revolved on Steam Early Access at the end of 2014. Pressing the big green [LAUNCH] button was exciting at the time after having blindly hoped each week before then we would get picked out the Greenlight queue to be able to do so. (We were also requested to build a version of the demo for the Oculus (pre-Facebook days) booth for DK2, with the new SDK when our units hadn’t arrived yet so again, were blind doing so.)
As it turns out, it wasn’t until March/April 2016 that the consumer launches for PC VR happened. We’d spent all our dev budget in 2015 trying to get as much game done and ready for launch, which was still mostly an unknown future date at that point. Thankfully, a very special person reached out and helped support us with some final launch polish budget and an Oculus Rift Launch Title store slot (& some base spec test PCs).
Two days in San Francisco for the Oculus Media Game Days flew by, before hanging around a bit longer for GDC that year. Up until that point, our events where we’d demoed the game consisted of trestle tables, pubs, small-scale indie pop-ups. OMD was something else we (I) had never experienced before — professionalism. Oculus after Facebook always do very well orchestrated and slick events, from setup to booth assistants to food and guest management. Back-to-back 30 minute slots with the gaming press was exhausting but at launch, getting listed in Time and Verge Top 5 Oculus Rift Launch Title lists was totally worth it.
The game did OK and generated enough revenue to cover the costs of the resumed Sony PS VR port. A deal was struck by the JV with a 3rd-party publisher to create physical versions to go into stores. However we weren’t party to that deal or the specifics and we still to this day don’t really know how well it did. The JV seemed sensible at the time but over the years the relationship became strained and trust slipped away on both sides. Similarly we had no visibility of the deal that was done with another 3rd-party publisher to create the Quest version, Radial-G : Proteus, something that most of the original team remaining at Make Real had nothing to do with. (Art & audio guru Michalis had gone to the JV side by then and worked on all releases.) It just appeared one day… It’s a good port but it shows the limitations of our initial limited budget and time available to create layers of depth to the game we always wanted to.
But, Radial-G put the studio on the map. It gave us an amazing thing we could talk about publicly, something we can’t sometimes do with client work depending upon agreements and contracts. We learned a lot and we gained a lot and whilst there’s many things we would do differently now if we could, the title will always hold a special place in my heart as a seed of opportunity that blossomed a much larger studio and a new game out of it.
After effectively having Radial-G in our lives on and off for 3–4 years, we wanted something light, bright, colourful and stupid after all the dark, moody, bangin’ techno sci-fi. Also this would be 100% our own title developed and published as the studio, under the studio name, no press-confusing alternative names and representations this time.
Warp Lands was a concept the Creative Director had rattling around his head, after playing games like Bishi Bashi and Mario Party. Multiplayer, short, simple to pick-up, tricky to master, all these sorts of things but with a stupid lilt to proceedings. We built a simple prototype concept demo that showed the core idea of playing around the metatable and transitioning into the table for a minigame. We had early access to Oculus Touch controllers and wanted to build something that explored how more natural hand tracked input could give and what type of interactions we could do with them. Thanks to our special friend once again, full funding (albeit comparatively small scale) was achieved mid-2016 and by late-2016, we had a team of 6–8 peeps working on it full time.
A large wall in the studio was marked out into quarters and post-it note filled one of them, covered in two/three-word scribblings of minigame ideas. Star stickers were put on post-it notes as we voted for our favourite ideas, the winning ones being moved over to the next quarter, the prototype area. 2–3 days saw a prototype for each winning minigame idea knocked up with dev art and placeholder assets. It didn’t matter what it looked like, it was more about what it felt like to play, and most importantly was it fun?
This process continued to alpha and beta and final until we had 16 minigames across 4 themes to create our initial launch metatable game board. The punt of the week paid off when after locating Brian Blessed’s agent, he agreed to be the voice of our beloved Grand Sensei character, bringing his special British bombastic style to proceedings. (We actually initially wanted Bob Hoskins to do the voice but that was impossible obviously.)
Unfortunately our special person was off work and we’d misinterpreted the contract. Thinking we couldn’t announce the game until we were told we could, or other parties did it for us, we failed to build up any awareness or anticipation for the game ahead of launch. We were also really struggling to know what to call it. As the design had progressed, the initial name Warp Lands didn’t make much sense or relation to the game now. Two weeks before launch we finally settled on Loco Dojo and realising only we were in control of our own announcing destiny, rapidly set about creating social media channels, posts, official website, trailers and getting the word out.
The game launched in April 2017 on the Oculus Rift Store, six months after signing the contract, getting the money in the bank and hiring the team to build it. We were, and still are, super proud of what that team achieved in that time with what was a pretty small amount of money in comparison, without crunching or making themselves ill over it, or impacting their families.
Three months later we re-launched but on Steam, wanting to give a window of exclusivity but also not having to go through the Greenlight process anymore. One of the key learnings from Radial-G was to keep your game code and platform code neat and separate so adding and changing platform support was a lot more straight-forward this time around.
People love the game when they play it. It’s wholesome to hear big belly laughs as they play. If I’m ever feeling a bit down, I just find a YouTube video of some people playing together and remind myself of the stupid fun we brought into the world.
We started the Santa Cruz port in 2018 as soon as we got the dev kits. Unfortunately we found out it wasn’t going to get through the curation process for launch of the Quest in March 2019, so we parked development to focus on other things. The game was doing really well in Location Based Entertainment (LBE) VR Arcades, something we hadn’t considered or factored into the design (even though there’s an unreleased video interview of me telling Mike Diver // Vice at the time in 2014, that VR Arcades were the future). Loco Dojo Fiesta saw a rapid version deployed to AlterEyes with just three randomly chosen rounds and none of the metatable game play elements, to create a tight 15-minute experience.
Then COVID happened in March 2020 and as countries around the world went into lockdown, our LBE revenues dried up overnight. It took 18-months or so for the world to reopen enough for LBE numbers to bounce back but many venues didn’t make it, or changed focus and types of experience they hosted.
Thankfully, just before lockdown, we met another special person who fought our corner internally to get Loco Dojo Unleashed greenlit for the Quest Store. After our own internal pitches to get the funding to continue development, the game finally made it to Quest in October 2021. This time we knew we could talk about it and we made sure we did well ahead of launch, to give it it’s best chance of success.
Within three weeks we had sold more copies on Quest than the Rift Store in 5 years. Within three months we’d sold more copies on Quest than all PC VR stores in 5 years. The Quest marketplace and user base is certainly much larger, but also very different to the early-adopter PC VR users. This is reflected by Chris Pruett’s talk at GDC this year about the Quest ecosystem, which ended up featuring my tweet of our unit sales on Christmas Day (with important numbers cropped off, sorry).
I’m sad to be missing what will be Loco’s 1st birthday on Quest on October 7th this year, as that’s after the end of my notice period. But I do know the game smashed all our internal targets and expectations and turned the necessary heads in the right direction to start looking at the next thing. We’ve pushed Loco as far as it can go without adding more content, and a lot of work under the hood is needed to be able to add more content. But the game is now super easy to get into, with a variety of single-player modes (which it was never designed to do) and ways to play together, either online or locally. Later in 2022 and into 2023 it will appear on other standalone devices.
I’ve been working on the next thing up until the end, whether it be Loco 2 or something entirely new, it’s not my place anymore to tell you what it is. That is very much in the hands of one of the people who will replace me, and I know they are going to smash it in making sure you know about it.
