Virtual punching, real music in the new game from Audiosurf's creator

Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2023
Audiosurf 2 Game Banner
Genre: Indie
Developer: Dylan Fitterer
Release Date: Tue, 26 May 2015
















Audioshield OfficialScreenshot1

In 2008, Dylan Fitterer released the first game to support Valve s Steamworks platform (other than Valve s own games, of course). You ve almost certainly heard of it:

More Vive games

HTC Vive

I saw 11 other VR games coming to the Vive at Valve's recent event.

After that, he moved on to VR support for Audiosurf 2. But he found it too intense for newcomers.

I started thinking, how can I take this and make it comfortable for people who are new to VR, who haven t really gotten to the point where a sinking stomach feeling can be a positive thing? So I started with tricking your brain what s moving. Am I moving, or is the track moving towards me? I eventually decided what I really want is a player who s in proper room scale VR who only moves when they move.

Playing Audioshield brought back fond memories of working out with Wii Sport s simple but satisfying boxing minigame, and it didn t even occur to me until afterwards that I must ve looked absurd punching into the air and swiping my arms left and right to block as many orbs as I could. I was immersed. Even so, as I was having fun in the moment I felt like the minimalist design may border on being too simple—that there s not enough going on in Audioshield to make me want to don a headset to play it.

Perhaps that s down to my expectations for rhythm games.

There are no more images for Audioshield yet, so here's one of Audiosurf 2.

Much as I like the information overload in rhythm games, I ve never played one in VR before. And as we re learning more and more, what works outside of VR isn t always what s best in VR. I wanted more feedback on how I was scoring as I played the game, but maybe that would ve just been distracting.

There s challenges when communicating things to players when they re in VR without breaking them out of this close connection, Fitterer said. It s you and the music. There s a little fragility to it that I don t want to mess up.

Audioshield as it stands represents about six months of work, and FItterer hopes to have it ready to launch with the Vive in a few months time. There s currently only one environment in the game, and he hopes to add another one before release. I asked about modding support, which seems an ideal way to give Audioshield more variety.


I think you re right on, and what I found with AUdiosurf 2 is the community is there and they do fantastic work, he said. There are so many awesome skins on the Audiosurf 2 workshop. I d love to do that again. I don t want to promise that, though, because it s a lot of work. So we ll see.









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