Superhot [Review: 9/10] is easily one of the best Oculus Touch titles available today. The beautiful art direction, ingenious gameplay mechanic of time only moving when you do, and creative puzzle environments all add up to one of the most memorable and enjoyable adaptations for VR we’ve seen thus far. Naturally, when the Make it Superhot Game Jam was announced, it came as no surprise. In the Game Jam, people are asked to create a Superhot-inspired piece of fan art, game, or mod, for a chance to win prizes. Available prizes include a GTX 1080 graphics card, Oculus Rift headset, thousands of dollars in cash, and much more. It’s not a Game Jam for the faint of heart.
One of the short Superhot-inspired game entries, Superpunch, immediately caught our attention when we saw it in action on Twitter, being promoted by designer and programmer, Joe Radak. With Andreas Jorgensen handling the art artwork and Keegan van der Laag with Davin Dobson (also known as Netscape Navigator) on music, it’s a solid team of individuals. You can watch a quick teaser for the game below:
“The core mechanic of the game is the punching locomotion, which I’ve been developing for the past couple months,” explained Radak in an email to Upload. “The science behind the locomotion is the impulse force that is imparted on your body when you punch (because of the punch), tricks your body into thinking that it’s accelerating in that direction. With the impulse, you can mask sliding the player over short distances with minimal motion sickness. Basically, the punch creates artificial acceleration in the direction of motion, which reduces motion sickness. So far it’s shown to be pretty motion-sickness free, but I haven’t tested it wide-range yet.”
Mechanically, the idea seems similar to other limb-movement-based locomotion systems we’ve seen, such as arm-swinging, running in place, and the Freedom Locomotion System. What makes this one different though is how important the mere act of punching is, seeing as how you have to always be punching to get much of anything done.
“The game itself is a simple wave-based game,” said Radak. “Instead of shooting your enemies though, they fire at you, and you punch the bullets back at them, or you can punch them directly if you get close enough. When I was developing the prototype, I wanted something that complimented the punching locomotion and had a bit of action behind it, thus, how this game was born. The current contest entry has 3 levels, each with 3-5 waves each. If I had more time and resources, or was to turn this into a full-fledged game, I would probably do something that wasn’t wave-based. Co-Op could be fun too.”
If you’re interested in trying out Superpunch, you can find out more information and download the short game on the itch.io page or the ModDB page. Only HTC Vive support is guaranteed, Oculus Rift and Touch was not tested. You can see more of the contest entries here if you scroll down to the bottom.
