I am incredibly proud to announce that our game “HitMotion: Reloaded” has been officially released and is now available on Viveport M!
It is the first true game of us of New Technology Walkers and we are so happy to have launched it. And it is not a standard release, it is the launch of a mixed reality game, that is even one of the 20+ launch titles of the Vive Focus Plus! Are you curious about it? Then discover it with me…
What is HitMotion: Reloaded?
HitMotion: Reloaded is the first Mixed Reality fitness game for the Vive Focus Plus. It is designed to make the user stay fit while having fun. It has been developed by us of New Technology Walkers, together with Whitelabel Foundation (that is, Enea Le Fons) that has contributed to the art and audio design and with HTC Vive, that has given us support, development hardware and also a little funding.
Actually HTC, in the person of Mister President Alvin Wang Graylin, has also shown that this is one of those VR games that can make you appear cool from the outside. Look at the President playing with it at VEC… isn’t he a pro?
How does it work?
HitMotion: Reloaded is made to let you move in VR while having fun. The game is all in mixed reality, so apart from the initial intro, whatever stage you will be in the app, you will always see your surroundings.
The game is composed of various levels. Once you will launch the chosen level, you will see some targets popping in the room around you. These targets will be colored according to the hand that you will have to use to destroy them: blue for the right hand, red for the left hand, white for both hands.
Every time you will punch a target, you will be awarded a score, that will be multiplied by a combo-factor that depends on how fast you are destroying consecutive targets. So, if you kill two in a row, you will be awarded a 2x on the score of the second target, and so on. If you take too much time to destroy two consecutive targets or you use the wrong hand to punch one, the combo multiplier will be zeroed.
To win a level, you have to destroy all the enemies that will pop out before the time runs out. But this will not be enough: you will also have to score enough points. Ah, and you have to survive: have I said that some enemies will try to attack you by ramming or shooting you? Oh yes… they are very nasty…and you will have to dodge them.
So, punching stuff, moving in the room and dodging attacks, you will for sure move a lot and have a great time.
What are its main features?
Some feature we are proud of are:
- Mixed Reality: this is maybe the first mixed reality game for a standalone virtual reality headset. We are incredibly proud of this, especially because the mixed reality technology is something that we developed in-house. I have already published a post explaining to you how to do AR on the Vive Focus, and for this game that technology has been improved to a version 2.0. Now there is some sort of reprojection to improve the perceived framerate of the passthrough and also some distortion correction, so the world around you isn’t fish-eye distorted anymore. We have also colored the passthrough, because black&white was too sad and as Enea Le Fons said, “it seemed to look through the security cameras of a bank”. Now it is azure, and so it is far better;
- Full Safety: this is one of the consequences of the Mixed Reality: you always see your surroundings, so there is no risk for you of punching the walls, or people around you (unless you want to punch them with the excuse of having a VR headset on, of course!). We always test it in our office, with all people working at their desks and we had zero accidents in all this period. Even at our booth at VEC, there were no security problems. You can play HitMotion everywhere, with zero risks. With other boxing VR games, instead, I always worry if there is someone or something around me that I can hurt. And then, of course, the Focus Plus has no cable… and this is a bonus for safety: have I told you that yesterday I have fallen to the floor playing Robo Recall because of the damn cable? Yeah, I was also taking the whole PC to the floor with me!
- Full Freedom: since we use the Vive Focus Plus, there is no need for a cable, a companion PC, or whatever. You can take the device with you wherever you want and whenever you want, turn it on, and have fun in your room. If with Beat Reality the world is your dancefloor, with HitMotion the world is your personal gym;
- Full movement: Beat Saber and Box VR have been designed for PC VR, and so they have always the targets coming towards you from only one direction. This way you don’t mess with the cable and with the frontal setup of many Rifts, but you can’t exploit your full space. Since with the Focus Plus you don’t have a cable and you can move everywhere, we designed the game so that the enemies appear all around your environment, and so you exploit all your space, moving in all your room;
- Full training: it’s not all about punching, but also about moving in the room to get closer to the targets and also dodging attacks. This way you will train in a more complete way;
- Fast-paced action: you can’t win the game without performing combos, so you can’t take it easy. You have to move fast and punch fast if you want to go to the next level;
- Feedback-driven development: we have released this game in the wild and we are waiting for feedbacks on how to improve it. Every opinion, review, insult, idea is very welcome. We are offering this demo version now because we want people to shape the game with us.
How has the idea born?
It has already been proved that Virtual Reality can help people in staying fit without the need to go to the gym: Beat Saber already makes various people sweat; Box VR represents a valid training for dodging and punching and some people use it to stay fit at home; more professional hardware like NordicTrack or Virzoom combine Virtual Reality with stationary bikes to make people train in a better way. In an article on this blog, Gabriel Moss has already detailed how many people don’t feel like going to the gym, and for them having the possibility of training at home using VR is for sure a plus, that has already helped various people in losing weight.
Inspired by this (hey, thanks Gabriel), when we got the 6 DOF Devkit for the Vive Focus, a fitness experience was one of the first ideas that come to our mind about applications that we could do with the headset. Since the Vive Focus Plus has only hands controllers (so not full body tracking), boxing seemed a natural fit for the game. We pitched the idea to HTC and they loved it… and so here we are launching the game as one of the 20 launch titles for the Vive Focus Plus!
Why this name?
“HitMotion: Reloaded” may seem a strange name if you don’t follow my adventures since a while. I mean, the “HitMotion” part of the name is clear, since you have to hit objects and move in the room… but why “Reloaded”?
Well, when I had my startup Immotionar, that was focused on full body VR, we made in 2016 a game together with Max Ariani and it was HitMotion. In this game, you had to punch and kick droids all around you in a ring in the outer space. It was a fun game and all people playing it sweated like if they had been in hell. The only problem was that it required three Kinects to work and so it was too much a hassle to be bought, installed and played.
When thinking about a fitness experience for the Vive Focus we said ourselves: “Hey, why don’t we repropose HitMotion, this time for the Focus Plus?” and we immediately loved the idea. Of course, the game had to be rethought, since the Focus Plus doesn’t offer full body VR. So, this is a reboot of “HitMotion”, that’s why the “Reloaded” part.
What is the status of the project?
We have published a demo on Viveport. You can play some levels and there are the main mechanics of the game already implemented (punching, dodging, etc…), but there is still a lot to be done.
After HTC approved the game, we gave ourselves some months to develop the game. But soon, they proposed us to showcase the game at VEC and to launch it together with the Focus Plus. It was a great opportunity, but at the same time something not feasible: usually game studios have many people and need years to develop good games… we are a little team and we should have designed and developed the game in something like 40 days. It was really a crazy and stupid idea.
That’s why we did it. And during the development, we had all the worst things possible happening to us and I really still don’t understand how we managed to actually ship something for VEC! I will tell you the full story in another post, because it is very interesting… for now I’ll just say: I think we all have all lost 10 years of our lives.
In this short time, it was only possible to make a demo and that’s what we did: on the store, you will be able to play a game that will give you the taste of what the final HitMotion will be. Probably the demo will appear a bit rough and also a bit too short to you because of the short development time and all the problems that we had to face… but we are working on it.
What are the plans for the future?
We want to take the game from a demo status to a full release status. So: improve the gameplay, improve the training mechanics, improve the graphics, improve the sound, adding more levels, adding a procedural endless mode, etc… You got it: improve everything!
And as I have said, we want to do this with you, listening to your feedbacks! It will be a lot of fun doing it together.
How can I download and play it?
First of all, HitMotion: Reloaded is currently available only for the Vive Focus Plus, so be sure to buy it 🙂 It is also playable if you have the Vive Focus with the 6 DOF Devkit.
You can download it for free from Viveport M. We decided to put the demo free so that to maximize the feedback and also because we wanted the most people possible to start training while having fun. After having played with it, pleasetell me your impressions via e-mail or on my social media channels.
Are you ready for the fitness battle? 😉