I have been working on this VR Quest game on weekends for the past 3 months. The name that I’ve settled on is Tobu-Tane or flying seeds in japanese. It represents the species of flying creatures that accompany you on your journey. I’m going for a sandbox platformer genre where there are several themed worlds which contain a few sublevels.  The sublevels will be challenging and abstract while the worlds themselves will be thematically consistent and more open world. This was directly inspired by Mario Odyssey’s play style where each level contains some hidden challenging content. 

I’m drawing inspiration from my favorite games from some of my earliest memories. When I was 6, Lego Island 2 came out and my parents bought it for me to play on our home PC. That game has remained lodged deep in my memory for all these years and I’ve recently revisited it for inspiration. One thing that I love about it is its variety of different things you do in the game. Pepper parachutes, dives underwater, fishes in a pond, races through the desert, and many other wildly different activities. The games willingness to stray from a core gameplay mechanic is inspiring. It has inspired me to forget about staying within the rigid guidelines I previously set for the game and remember that fun is fun. During testing if something fun happens, I find a way to keep it in the game even if it doesn’t fit the original vision. This loose creative process allows me to quell overthinking and trying to plan the full game before it’s finished, and instead let creativity and fun control the path of development. In this game you will swim, float, jetpack in space, ice skate, bounce, teleport, and more.

More to come,

John