#dev diary for class

Can’t believe I forgot about the existence of Eastshade. 

Its one of the most stress-free games I’ve ever played. Even more so than Stardew Valley or any other farming sim. 

It’s a game about a painter going to an island called Eastshade to paint key locations to fulfil the last wish of their mom. And the locations are absurdly beautiful. Everything is so calming and colourful and designed to be picturesque. It has to considering the main game mechanic is to paint. All you do is capture the scene you want and then the picture is painted onto a canvas on your easel. Simple.

The voice acting is a little off but considering this game was made by one guy and some volunteers I’d give it a pass. The soundtrack is seriously one of my favourite of all time. 

Considering the modding aspect of this thing.

The idea is for Walk in Another World to be better than VR Chat. Or well, to serve a different purpose. 

VRChat is a great place to hang with strangers and friends and meme things up. It’s a creative outlet as well as a fun time. WIAW is more about the solo experience at the moment where you get to enjoy a place for yourself to be yourself and be calm. 

More Graphic Detail More Stuff Ambience Music Lighting

The access bit is what I’m wondering about. 

Maybe it could work like a login and selection screen where you choose what world you want to go to. 

A store page could help with the funding aspect where you can purchase access to additional worlds to go to. It wouldn’t be nice to make it too expensive but that’d be mostly up to the companies control.

Monetisation could also work for freelance creators who want to upload their world as well. It’d be up to them if they want to monetise where people need to pay upfront or do what Nexus Mods does where you can choose to donate to the creators. 

Solo or Hang Out spot

Here’s where the VR Chat connection comes in.

The map can either be solo for someone who wants to be alone in a game setting they love. And then there’s hang outs where people can be invited to the hosts world. 

The second can also be expanded upon where the group can roleplay or play tabletop games using the world as a simple map. The ideal would be having a nice large map for exploration but that might be resource intensive and having multiple of these downloaded at a time could be taxing on a laptop. That is unless the maps are on servers and available for access.

How to implement models would be the tricky bit. Then it’d be more like VR chat. 

There may be a cap on how many people can access a map at a time to avoid overloading things. Then that’d also help with the model side of things cause it'd be nice if the models were related to the game itself. 

VR Chat on Steroids

That’s a good way to explain this project. 

The project can definitely work as a way to help with mental health as it has been known that sometimes when you’re in a game you like it can help with calmness and other things. 

People also have very fond memories of games so having this sort of connection and calm place can act like a safe space. Even games that are violent if they’re empty and there is no risk of action and a need to shoot thins it might also work as a calming place. (An empty COD map would be hilarious and I have no idea if that’d work)

The danger though is that they might feel like liminal spaces due to that emptiness. I’d have to be semi-populated with things rather than absent of life entirely. 

Note: For information https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00260/full

Project Team - This one is hard to answer. I think I’d rather approach a studio about this or approach Unity. Maybe volunteers would be good for the community/non-company creations side of things. But you’d def need some modellers, coders, and everyone included in the crew for creating a VR map. 

Funding Options - approaching Unity/video game companies means the funding will be up to them. They’d have their own investors taking care of it.

Development Time Line - Hard to judge. It would depend on how fast the team can work. Likely several months to a year. 

Marketing - Nostalgia trip, mental health relaxation. That sort of thing.

Route To Market - No clue.

Distribution - Online Game stores like Steam, GoG etc

Development Costs - Expensive. 

Write a post on your chosen platform and think about the mechanics and audience engagement.

Platform: VR

Mechanic: It’s a walking simulator. Not overly complex