I officially became a Steam Partner earlier this week! This allowed me to put up a private build of my VR game to download, install, and play through Steam. It's a small step. I still need to actually, you know, make an actual game. But, it was exciting to see one of my products come through the Steam pipeline :)
A few weeks back I was lucky enough to attend Steam Dev Days 2016. I was looking forward to learning all sorts of new lessons about launching a 2D indie game on Steam.
The keynote presentation spent a lot of time talking about Valve's Vive hardware. It was very obvious that Valve was all-in when it came to VR. I had tried out the Oculus before. It's pretty amazing, but it never really gripped me. My years as a game dev have made me into a skeptic when it comes to new tech. I have heard enough times how device X will "change the world!". And, so I had pretty much dismissed the Vive outright. I skipped all the panels about VR. I didn't bother looking at the Vive demo stations. I spent all my time at Dev Days focusing on my 2D game adventures. Dev Days had come to a close. I had enjoyed the after party, and was getting ready to head home when someone convinced me to try out one of the Vive demo stations.
It only took 10 seconds before I was converted.
The Vive's sensors and controllers give you a physical presence in the VR world that I hadn't experienced before. No longer was I just looking around. Now I was actually there in the world. I could walk around. I could pick things up. It was 100% mentally teleported to this new world.
2 days later I found myself upgrading my work PC, purchasing a Vive system, and starting out on my new adventure.
I am now making a VR game :)
I talked a bit before about how I have built my own custom game engine. I started that somewhere around 2011 or so. I spent a few years worth of Saturdays building the engine, editor, and pipeline, and I have been happy with the results.
About 2 months ago or so I started to consider dropping my custom engine and moving over to Unity.
I weighed the pros and cons for a long time. I tried hard to ignore the personal attachment I had to my own custom engine. In the end I think there are a handful of things that I think my engine does better, but there are hundreds of things Unity does better. I evaluated Unity a little bit back around 2010 or so. It obviously didn't grab my attention then, but the powerhouse that it has become is truly amazing. I am confident that the few things I don't like about Unity now will not be issues in the coming years. Ultimately, I realized that there was no way I could advance my own engine nearly as fast as Unity is advancing.
So, yeah, I am eating my words now. I have dropped my custom engine and moved over to Unity. To be fair, I am pretty sure I never said "never". Oops .....
