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[sunsetdivision]

Hi TIGSource! As of July 2020, we are just about a month into development on Hands on Deck, a new cross-platform VR board & card game simulator.

Our goal with this game:

We want you to be able to forget you're playing in VR and just enjoy a cozy game with friends.

Here's a first look at gameplay:





We don't have much to announce right now, but we can share that we have several games working and an easy way to add new games.

We are focused on building something more than just a physics simulator and we are paying special attention to natural interactions with cards & decks, game pieces, dice, etc. We have minimized button usage to make it as simple as possible to use.

HoD is cross-platform. We are using 2 Quests and a Vive in the playtest above.

All graphics are temporary—we are focused on making interactions simple and fun first.

More to share in the coming weeks.

For now, we'd love your feedback in a short survey. If you'd like to sign up for future updates, add your email here, and of course, you can join our discord.

[sunsetdivision]

Please note, Hands on Deck is still in pre-alpha right now and all graphics are temporary.

This week we made progress on several core gameplay features and started to build the game lobby for creating, finding, and joining rooms, getting us one step closer to opening HoD up to early alpha testers!

We got multi-select to feel more natural for most use-cases. Fixing some bugs around multi-select and its interaction with the player's hand of cards means it's now easy and fun to lay down your cards at the end of a hand of poker.

We started adding snap points this week. This will make many kinds of games easier to play, but it's most clear on games with dense grid-based boards like Go and Chess. This is a starting implementation--there are plenty more features to go, but it's nice to see the first version of this feature enabling new games already!

Adding Chess to HoD took about 15 minutes, which is great! One goal we have with HoD is to make it easy to set up new games. While we haven't yet built some major features for game creators like a visual game editor and scripting support, if you're comfortable with JSON, adding a new game isn't so hard.

HoD now has a basic game lobby to create and join games. This is an important step towards opening HoD up to some early alpha users.

[Devilkay]

I think that this is a great idea for a VR game! But my huge question is... is the VR still so used to develop a good project like this?

[sunsetdivision]

Another week, another Hands on Deck update!

Please note, HoD is still in pre-alpha and all graphics are temporary.

This week we decided to improve the experience joining a room and loading in games and one-off items. We also added some new features and a couple new games!

Improved rooms & game loading: You can finally join a game in progress or re-join a room once you leave. We are still perfecting this, but we made significant steps forward last week. Games also load faster because resources are cached locally.

New features:
- Dice (D6 for now) -- We now have a first version of dice! This is major for us as it is one of the more important parts of board games we have been missing until now. We will continue working to improve the feel of rolling dice and we are looking at ways to keep them on the table when they are rolled, but this is a good start. We also have a first version of dice cups to roll several dice at once.
- Large-print view of cards -- It can be hard to read small print in VR, so we show a large version of cards when they are selected.
- Privacy zones -- Just like card hands should be private, in some games other objects should also be private. For example, in the game Liar's Dice (which we added this week), your dice should not be seen by others.

New games:
- Ludo -- Ludo is a classic that many people grew up playing a variation of (Sorry!, for me). We were able to add it now that we have dice in HoD.
- Liar's Dice -- This is a fun, social game about bluffing and blatantly lying to your friends.

[sunsetdivision]

I think that this is a great idea for a VR game! But my huge question is... is the VR still so used to develop a good project like this?

Hi Devilkay! We understand your concern about the number of people playing VR, and whether there will be enough to make a game like this make sense. We think most people playing *Hands on Deck* will likely want to play with their friends (this is from the results of an ongoing survey), so as long as a group of friends are able to join in and play a game together, we think *HoD* will be successful. To that point, we realize that most people don't have a VR headset, and we are looking closely at how we might be able to support non-VR. We are building *HoD* to be VR-first, but possibly not VR-only.

[sunsetdivision]

This week we added some new features, a couple new games, and cleaned up a bunch of outstanding bugs.

New games:
- Checkers
- Nine Men's Morris

New features this week:
- Grab movement - We got feedback from play-testers that reaching all the way across the table can be challenging. We decided to try out a grab-move mechanic to let you pull yourself across the table with one hand, be able to grab something, and get back to your seat quickly.
- Scaling yourself - There's no real need to become a giant or a pipsqueak while playing board games, but it turns out it can be quite fun. It also turns out that making yourself a bit smaller (and therefore objects appear a bit larger) can make things more readable in VR.
- Hand models - We added a first-pass hand model this week. We are still iterating to make the best grab and multi-select experience, but already it's a nice improvement over the mitts we had before and it already feels more expressive to see other people's hands.
- Very early creator tool - As we continue to add games and look toward other people being able to do so, we created a simple tool to make it easy to upload resources (textures and models) for use in building games. This is just the start!

Please note, the game is still in pre-alpha and all graphics are temporary.

[sunsetdivision]

Please note, the game is still in pre-alpha right now and all graphics are temporary.

This week we have some exciting new features to show off that expand the scope of Hands on Deck and we add a couple new games to the library, bringing it to a total of 8 so far. Our video this week captures progress over the past 3 weeks.

VR & PC Cross-Play: Hands on Deck is being built with VR support at its core, however we also realize that most people don't have a VR headset and you want to play with your friends whether they have a headset or not. So this week we are revealing the first progress on PC support! We now have an early build that lets Windows users play HoD games alongside friends with VR headsets.

Creator Tools: Scripting: Scripting allows game creators to customize how to play and teach their game. We added the very earliest support for scripting this week and created a first example to set up the game of Klondike. There is so much more to do here, but we're off to a good start!

New Games:
- Chinese Checkers
- Klondike (Solitaire)

Both PC (non-VR) support and scripting are at their earliest stages, but still far enough along we wanted to share. Expect to hear more about both of these in the coming weeks.

[sunsetdivision]

Please note, the game is still in pre-alpha right now and all graphics are temporary.

This week our focus was on fixing a bunch of bugs we introduced over the past few weeks, but we still found time to add some cool new features about how you interact with the world in both VR and on PC, and we added a couple new games!

Games:
- Dominoes (double-six) - The classic game with setups for standard play and for making domino chains to topple.
- Reversi - This classic game includes scripting to flip pieces as the game is played.

Features:
- In-game UI - We have been experimenting with the best way to interact with the game UI when in a room, and we are ready to show off what is now several iterations in with a small panel at your seat at the table. This let's you pick a game, pull in library objects, update settings, and leave the room. We will continue iterating to make this the most natural way possible to interact with the larger game while in your room.
- Context menu (VR) - When you select objects, often there are several things you might want to do, like joining cards into a deck, or stacking objects, or splitting a deck, or dealing cards. Our inside wrist context menu let's you do these things in a context-sensitive way based on what you have selected.

That's all for this week!

[sunsetdivision]

Please note, the game is still in pre-alpha and all graphics are temporary.

This week we worked on overall stability, improving the PC UI, and adding a couple new games.

We are excited to show off our first original game by a new friend of ours over in Sydney. Andrew has been working on Neapolitan for about 2 years now. Neapolitan is a co-operative map-building card game about building an ice cream shop and serving customers delicious sundaes. When he showed us the fun and social gameplay, we knew we wanted to add it to HoD. Look for more original games in the future!

Games:
- Neapolitan - Serve customers sundaes in your very own ice cream shop in this co-op campaign card game by Andrew Shellshear.
- Backgammon - The classic 2-player game

Features:
- Improved PC UI - We revamped the PC UI this week and simplified the main menu while in a room, started building out the game selection UI, and added context actions for the selected objects. There's more to do with selected objects, so you'll see more updates here in the future. This update brings it to parity with the VR UI now.

Anyway, that's it for this week!