Last week we revealed the first gameplay for Grave VR, a prequel to the upcoming Grave from Broken Window Studios. In that post, I said I had been worried the series might have been killed off. As it turns out, it nearly was.
Save for one retweet, the game’s Twitter account had been inactive since September of last year, and there have only been a sprinkling of Kickstarter backer updates in 2016. Despite making a more than respectable $37,622 with the help of 1,111 backers in that crowd-funding campaign, it seemed like Grave might have been laid to rest, joining the growing list of successfully funded games that never see completion. That made the reveal of its VR prequel an even sweeter surprise.
So, what’s been going on?
According to studio designer and co-founder Tristan Moore, one issue has been the Broken Window’s small size, especially since the project has grown in ambition.
“Grave started out as a kind of Slender: The Arrival size of game, and it’s turned out to be a lot more like a BioShock or Fallout size of game in that it’s got like 20/30 hours of gameplay as it stands right now,” he explained. “There’s a lot of open world side stories, like there’s multiple endings for the main game, there’s a lot of different things that the gameplay can have that changes based on how you’re interacting with the game.”
Another more simple issue was money.
“We have some people that we have in satellites for programming and art and all that kind of stuff and really how much work we can have them do is really dependent on how much reserve funding we have,” he told me over Skype last week.
Broken Window helped replenish its cash reserves with a second game, Reflections.
Released in Early Access back in June of last year for $9.99, this is a quaint little first-person experience that also supports the Oculus Rift as well as standard monitors. It’s an adventure game in which you’re tying up loose ends before you move out of your home and your actions affect the overall story. During our interview, Moore says that it was originally meant to be a “one and done” development cycle, but well over a year on it still remains in pre-release form.
Some of Broken Window’s time has been dedicated to development of Reflections, then, but it also got extra cash from the sales it made. Moore then revealed, however, that the game later had a far more “life saving” effect on the company thanks to one very important prize it won earlier this year.
Reflections was the grand prize winner of the 2016 Global VR Challenge in Shanghai, China. The competition, which judged games already released rather than a more traditional game jam, awarded its winner some $17,000.
“That was something where like, as a poor kid growing up in very meager means, that was pretty great to start seeing some of this stuff coming together,” Moore recalls. “In a lot of situations that would be a very nice boon, but for us it was almost life saving.”
He later adds: “And so actually, we initially released Reflections as a kind of a funding solution for Grave, and this actually seriously paid off in that respect because we’ve been able to inject a lot of that money not just into the final version of Reflections but to also actually bringing Grave VR to a swift conclusion and actually bringing it out in time for Halloween.”
So what of Reflections, then? Moore says the full game should be out in Q1 of next year. The developer acknowledged that, while the first act of the game had been well received by players, the second act still needed work and there’s a third to still add on top. The team also wants to add in full voice over support among other features. It also has “to balance our work on Reflections with our work on Grave to make sure that we’re meeting our obligations to our backers and that we’re also providing this Halloween experience [Grave VR].”
The full version of Grave, meanwhile, will probably be releasing about a year from now. Broken Window is still deciding if it wants to include some of the more intuitive VR features like position tracked controls in the full game. We’re certainly hoping it does.
Finally, Grave VR hits on October 25th for the HTC Vive, with Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR versions to follow. In other words; Broken Window has a busy 12 months ahead of it.
