What drives a VR studio to keep updating games years after launch? With Sweet Surrender's free Update 11 incoming, we interviewed Salmi Games to learn more.
It's been a long journey for Sweet Surrender, 2021's VR roguelike shooter, and May's Resurrection update delivered notable improvements. Quest 3 users now benefit from new visual effects, Bloom, and HDR lighting, while wider changes included refining horizontal recoil for guns. Yacine Salmi, CEO and founder of Salmi Games, told me things are far from over.
Speaking at last week's Develop: Brighton conference, we began by discussing Sweet Surrender's development history. After releasing two previous VR games, the studio began pursuing a first-person shooter after exploring shooting mechanics in Growrilla VR.
"The shooting mechanics we added, like taking the shotgun off a farmer, turned out to be pretty fun. We decided to double down and said, ‘Let's do a shooter’ even though there are a lot of shooters in VR... I had a dream of making a shooter that was heavily inspired by Spelunky."
Salmi's original vision involved making the entire world destructible, though he later realized that didn't particularly work. Wanting to target the Quest market, the team adopted a low-polygon art style that "hadn't really been done much in VR at that point," taking a stylized approach to work with Quest 1 limitations. After pitching this idea, Salmi Games received some funding from Meta.
I'm told the studio's early flatscreen title, Ellipsis, wasn't financially successful and that Salmi was initially drawn to VR as the studio sought a niche. Salmi believes you should design around what you can only do in VR, saying it's "difficult to take a normal game and slap VR onto it."
"I thought it was a cool medium that was only going to grow, and that presented a lot of new design challenges. We got access to some dev kits and tried to double down... And it's fun. It's growing, this market is still pretty new and exciting, and there are still a lot of opportunities. It's still challenging to make a sustainable living out of VR, but I think we've managed to carve out our niche."
Noting his point about sustainability, I queried what inspired Salmi to keep releasing free updates for a VR game nearly three years after its initial release. Some of this comes from prototyping new projects.
"We've been prototyping new projects trying to secure funding and there's so much feedback from our players about friction they've encountered, things they'd like to see added to the game. This year, we finally had some time to go back, take a lot of what we learned from those prototypes, and apply it to Sweet Surrender."
That includes the Resurrection update. Since Sweet Surrender was designed for Quest 1, it never took full advantage of Quest 2 beyond a higher frame rate, leaving Salmi Games with space for Quest 3 improvements.
While a PSVR 2 version appears unlikely, the studio is looking at further updates based on player feedback. That includes the upcoming 'Update 11,' which mainly focuses on quality-of-life changes, bug fixes, new “funny deaths” achievements, and further improvements, like making smooth turning proportional to how much you push the analog stick.
Salmi also detailed the current plans for Update 12.
"It's focused on the final boss, we've got a lot of new different phases for it, new visuals, it’s essentially been rebuilt from the ground up. We're introducing a new player-friendly mode [in Update 11]. It was originally a hardcore roguelike, and this new mode is where you can die and then continue from that level. So, more players will get to see the late-game content if they want."
Once further balancing updates are done - which will include new upgrades, new chips and some weapon improvements, Sweet Surrender will mostly wrap up as the studio advances development on its next project. It's too early for Salmi to discuss specifics, though he believes that "it will make our Sweet Surrender fanbase quite happy."
Sweet Surrender is available now on the Meta Quest platform and Steam.
