If you had told me three years ago, that our VR game would still not be finished, I would not have believed you for a second. Yet here we are, three years later, roughly 20,000 hours of work, and our game is not in the store.
To say I was feeling discourage about our progress at the beginning of this year (2023) would be a massive understatement. I was questioning a lot of our development decisions, not least of which was choosing to make a game for Mobile VR.
2022 was the toughest year yet for HAX and our small team of three. Problems with net-code plagued us month after month. Every step we took forward felt like the guardian feature got turned off and we smashed our face against a wall.
We've all heard the expression, "Good things take time." The problem is not that this saying is untrue, it's that everything we see on the internet and social media is sped up and presented as if it's simple and easy and ridiculously fast. Just look at how we consume videos now - they're called "shorts."
Even a video showing you how to build a house has to be less than a minute or you get bored. We've condensed months of planning and hard work into seconds. This is the world we observe now: it's a fast-forward, super-simple, anyone can do it first-try kinda world.
But it's not. We know it's not, and yet we still expect it from ourselves and others.
It was this expectation of speed and ease that was causing me a lot of frustration and to be too hard on myself.
It is unrealistic to expect the speed of the world to respect you. Respect yourself and slow down. Good things take time.
I often tell people that Game Development takes twice as long as you'd expect, and VR-Game Development takes twice as long as that. Oh, and then there's Mobile-VR-Game Development, which comes with even more constraints. Oh, and before we move on, there's Multiplayer-Mobile-VR-Game Development. You get the picture. It's not easy and sure ain't fast.
VR is still amazing, it's still exciting, it's still here and only getting better. Perhaps it's not moving a bit more slowly than we'd all like, but good things take time, and VR is a great thing.
Davy
P.S. Thank you to everyone who has continued to cheer for us over the last couple of years despite the perceived slowness of this project. We're so incredibly grateful. The best is yet to come!