Unnatural Selection VR -- Now Available on itch.io!

Hello friends, come download my game!

I've uploaded a VR game to itch.io that a few ex-WIMO employees and I made for an internal game jam back in 2023: Unnatural Selection VR. Please click that link to check it out! 

UNSVR can best be described as a lighthearted, quest-based, underwater fish breeding and decoration game. You'll be taking on the role of an underwater field technician whose job is to breed new, hybrid fish for headquarters, decorate the freshwater lakebed with decorations, spruce up the underwater environment, and explore the world below the surface. 

Just put any two fish in a spawning cloud and BOOM, instant quirky hybrid fun!

In UNSVR you’ll unlock decorations, make hybrid fish mashups, and slowly uncover hidden decorations in the lake. The game features:

🐠 -- 10 hidden decorations scattered throughout the environment

🌈 -- Special clouds that give fish new skins

📻 -- A grab-and-go underwater radio in the entrance cave that plays music as you explore

🧠 -- A light quest system with a few secrets to uncover

🪸 -- The ability to decorate and personalize your lakebed with unlocked items

Ultimately, it’s a chill, underwater VR experience with a sense of humor and a lot of heart.

That's how the magic happens!

A little backstory on this release: After WIMO closed its doors, I received permission from the old CEO to use the game and the assets from the game for personal projects. At first, I was going to recreate the game, polish it a bit, and release a modified and simplified version of UNSVR, but that proved incredibly difficult. 

1- I didn't have the original Unreal files, only the game itself. 

2- While I could use programs like Fmodel and Blender to crack it open to try and recreate it, I'm being real: I'm more of a designer, audio engineer, and a team lead than a solo all-in-one design/art/code wizard. (I'm working on it!😅)

3- We used Unreal instead of Unity, and my Unreal experience is still growing.

Our team worked incredibly hard on it over a period of a week and used a lot of existing assets (even improving existing assets) from a mobile game project that never saw mass release. (You can read about the original incarnation of Unnatural Selection in my game portfolio.)

Collect decorations and make your environment your own!

Notes about playing UNSVR:

• The game is free and was built for Oculus Quest using a Link Cable to a PC.
• It might work with other headsets like Vive or Index, but no guarantees—if you try it, I’d love to hear how it goes!
• The game saves automatically any time you complete a quest or breed fish. So hopefully you won't have to worry about crashes or lost progress.
• Playtime is roughly 30–60 minutes, depending on how much exploring and decorating you do. Once you complete your environment, you could probably spend an hour or so just swimming around with the radio and looking at all your crazy fish collection.
• SHOW ME YOUR CRAZY FISH!  I'd love to see what kind of strange mutant fish you can create.  Feel free to tag me on social media if you make something special.

Just a few fun secrets to unlock within!

Why release it now? Well, because it’s fun, quirky, and a fantastic snapshot of what our team could do in just a week with some wild fish ideas and a shared love for underwater experimentation.

And mostly, because I think this little project deserves to be played. Let me know if you give it a shot—and if you feel you qualify to be the Employee of the Quarter at UNS. 

👉 Download Unnatural Selection VR here

Special thanks to the team: Ryan Chapman, Tom Purdue, Paul Constantine, Cory Haltinner, Kyle Marcum, and Sean Macintosh.

Happy Dueling!

Loving That Underwater VR Walkabout Mini-golf!

I truly would love to review every single underwater experience in VR I can get my hands on. (I'm going to make a new "Underwater VR" tag so I can start cataloging them. It's a strange genre and mostly filled with "submarine" games, but I've made a short list of games to look at. It'd also make a really cool YouTube series . . . you know, one of those weird subgenres of games that you'll probably never play, but some random dude on the Internet went on a quest to play them all. That's the kind of YouTube I can just zone out to.

Anyway, about a week ago, the Ruff Talk VR Discord channel had a meetup to play Walkabout Minigolf (WMG). Fortunately and unfortunately, it was just me and my buddy Amelia that showed up to the event. Unfortunately, because it's always fun to play with more. Fortunately, because Amelia offered up her entire WMG library of expansions and allowed me to choose our course. 

WMG is pretty great because it'll let anybody just play an expansion course on a guest pass. Meaning, that as long as someone owns the course, it'll let you play that course with them in multiplayer. The only downside to that is you can't collect any hidden balls or complete the hard course quest to earn a new putter, which totally makes sense from a business standpoint.

 

swimming up high and looking down at a few holes in the underwater golf course

Of course, I'm going to choose to guest pass the underwater Atlantis mini-golf course I don't own! Amelia obliged and we were soon putting around in an Atlantian underwater fantasy.

Rule one of underwater mini-golf, bring forth the mermaid statues and coral structures!

The course itself was good. I found it a fair bit less difficult than some of the newer courses I've played like the Meow Wolf course or the Venetian course. We didn't play the hard version of the course, but I didn't have any problems scoring under par on my first attempt around the 18 holes of underwater magic.

HERE, TURTLE TURTLE!

Even better, they made it so you could grab on to larger sharks, manta rays, and turtles and ride them around as they circled the course. I loved that little extra feature. It's things like this that make WMG one of the most well-thought-out experiences. It's not just a mini-golf course, it's an experience as well.

The sun shining through the underwater ruins of the mini-golf course was a nice touch

Of course, they didn't mess with the physics of their real mini-golf experience. It's all an illusion of being underwater. You're not going to smack a ball as hard as you can to only have it go 12 inches forward and start floating upward -- that'd just be frustrating. It is a pretty great illusion though. Little hexagonal graphic fish were darting around in small schools and the sharks were circling. I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing a mini-golf game with Amelia.

Six under par! Not bad!

Rest assured, this isn't really the only underwater experience you have in WMG. There's also, the infamous 20,000 Leagues under the Sea course, but that all takes place inside Captain Nemo's submarine. The only times you'll catch a glimpse of being underwater is through the submarine windows, on hole 18 where the Kraken has broken through, or if you fly outside of the course boundaries and take a look at the sub from an outside view.

I love my 20,000 Leagues putter. It's Krakentastic!

I own the 20,000 Leagues under the Sea course, but after last week, I'm pretty sure I'll pick up the Atlantis course on my next opportunity.

Happy Dueling!

I bought World of Diving for $2

I've been a bit fascinated with underwater VR games since I first strapped on a headset and realized that it felt like I was wearing a diving mask. It's a bit uncanny and so it's easy to understand why a game like World of Diving exists. It's actually crazier to me that there aren't MORE games like World of Diving, but I get it . . . . It's a gamble and a game like this wouldn't make you rich. This is my best guess at why there are so many shooters in the VR space. They sell. Games like World of Diving don't.

Steamdb has tracked World of Diving over the past couple years, and when it's gone on sale it's either been between the $5 and $2 range. That tracks for me since it's an older VR game from 2014, and it has a 3-star rating on Steam.

World of Diving is all about the extremes

Having already been exposed to Ocean Rift (one of my first purchased games on the Oculus) and loving the feeling of jetting around looking at the ocean floor and swimming aside sea creatures, when World of Diving popped up for $2 during Black Friday sales, I . . . dove in . . . and purchased it.

The past week has been World of Diving week for me, which I needed since before this I was in a couple very active games (Synth Riders and Hellsweeper -- thanks for the suggestions Amelia!). World of Diving is super super chill, but still a game, so it's already better than Ocean Rift or TheBlu. 

The problem with Ocean Rift is that it's an experience, not a game.  Basically in Ocean Rift you're visiting a virtual underground museum looking at sea life and not much else.  The other popular underwater experience is TheBlu, which is currently free to play with 3-4 $2 DLC. The free to play experience in TheBlu is like 3 minutes. It's a great 3 minutes where you stand in place and a whale looks you in the eye and swims past you. It would be a pretty great "first experience" for a VR newbie, but . . . ultimately it's pretty short. I did like how the ship shook when the whale zoomed past you though. Nice touch.

So! All that said!  Let's talk World of Diving!  This Jamaican 6-pack bustin' diving shop owner is your guide.

Ray likes turtles and is Jamaican right down to the tip of his undies.

Ray has quests for you! The basic game loop here is that you visit Ray, and Ray tells you where to go next.  Done. You open up your handy dandy underwater camera/quest/fishopedia and there's a little yellow marker telling you exactly where to go to find your next destination.

Have green squares, will photograph! 

I love everything about this thing except for its font. Completely unbelievable that a company that created such a device would use such an unreadable font for its interface.  A white, thin, and san serif font?! I don't buy it and I don't like it.  It is a pretty cool gadget though. I wish the pictures that I took with it were stored somewhere on my hard drive. I dug through folders hoping it was so, but alas . . . Steam F12 or Oculus screenshot button were the best I could do.

I had fish density turned all the way up in the options

Most of Ray's missions came in one of two flavors: collection quest or photography quest. It was like playing Pokemon Snap in a way.  After you'd finish a quest, Ray would give you a follow on quest until you had finished all the main quests in an area, then you'd unlock the next biome. In all there were 8 biomes you could play in: Thailand, Bonaire, Australia, Okavango Delta, Lockheed, North Carolina, Bismarck, and Brazil.

I'm not sure if he saw me after a while.

The first biome was the most fleshed out and completed. After that, there were maybe only 4-5 quests in each biome. The fish in the biomes started to taper off as well. Because of this, it feels like the game was rushed to completion after the first biome was polished, but they all had something unique and interesting to explore.

PRAISE CLEAN OCEAN FLOORS!

While questing, there are some side quests you can pick up for photographing things. There are also hidden collection quests for picking up junk, finding doubloons, and finding other treasures. I picked up a lot of trash in the virtual seas, but alas I haven't finished any of these sub-quests.

People just leaving their trash bags everywhere these days!

Quests award you with gold and you can spend that gold on unlocking wearable diving gear. As a player you don't see any visible changes in what you're wearing, but apparently this game supports multiplayer where it would matter more.  That's actually the most shocking part here. Multiplayer?! I love it! I wonder if that's networked or player-hosted? It'd be interesting to find out someday if I find a diving partner.

The quests end at the second to the last biome, which has you searching through an old sunken nazi submarine. You end up swimming through rusty old tunnels looking for items.  The very last quest of the game is to find 8 hidden bars of gold. It was a bit of a cheap play here on that quest. You had to stick your hand through a ship bunk's geometry and click eight times in a hidden location.  Kinda weird.

In the words of Indiana Jones, "Nazis, I hate these guys!"

After that, they open a biome for you to just swim around in and perform photography side quests and junk clean up.  The best surprise though was this amazing My Little Pony Esque ship that was sunk there.

The best sunken ship in the game hands down. Worth the time spent to get to the final zone.

I love the fact that there was some crazy pirate in this unspoken lore that floated around in a my little pony ship and unleashed cannon fire on other pirates . . . only in One Piece and the final biome of World of Diving, friends.

The game was not without its bugs mind you. I mean, if I had paid full price for this game I would have been pretty irritated when I needed to restart the entire game because my ability to select quest icons and click in the quest window just suddenly didn't work. But, since I bought the game on the cheap and it has provided me with six hours of underwater fun so far, it's totally worth it!

If you know of a good diving VR game, let me know. I'd love to check it out.

Happy Dueling!