Experience VR fun with Beers and Boomerangs

Love beer? Love boomerangs? Then IndieBloom have the perfect mix for you with Beers and Boomerangs, an indie VR gaming experience 🍻🪃

What goes around…

From the minds of Witty Platypus, an indie videogame developer duo consisting of fiancé (Diogo) and fiancée (Inês), ‘a couple of Portuguese biomedical engineers, that one day decided to build a video game’. We reached out to Diogo who wonderfully answered our questions via email - the following is what he had to say about Beers and Boomerangs.

We really wanted to make a boomerang game! There's something about throwing and catching that is so satisfying and exclusive to VR. So we started with boomerangs and boring red cylinders. When we decided to make a real game out of it we decided to replace the placeholders with kangaroos to keep with the Australia boomerang theme, which led to the important question: "Why are we harassing kangaroos?". At this point, Inês and I may or maybe not had a beer at a pub bouncing ideas, and we thought "Maybe they are stealing our beer!". From there we just naturally pivoted to a hybrid between cooking and surviving with a few lessons from Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and Overcooked!

Furthermore,

In January of 2021 Diogo quit his job and decided to work full-time on Beers and Boomerangs while Inês worked part-time. In March 2022, Inês also quit her job so we finally became a proper team of two! We are both generalists and tried to do most of the code, music and art by ourselves.

Diogo (left) and Inês (right) of Witty Platypus

Having spent time playing the demo (available through Meta Quest’s App Lab and SideQuest) on Meta Quest 2 and getting used to picking up and throwing the boomerang, Diogo explains the first 2 months of development heavily involved making the mechanics for the boomerang throwing and catching super satisfying - becoming his favourite aspect. ‘I still have fun just messing with it even after 2 years of testing and playing the game!’.

A big part of the game was created with Spelkollektivet (the world's largest co-living and co-working space for game developers from all over the world, based in Sweden). From this, the demo consists of 3 levels, we were keen to know what’s Witty Platypus’ favourite level and mode.

My personal favorite "level" may be an Easter egg-y level, but it wouldn't be much of an Easter egg if I give too many details about it! Asides from that, I really like the first boss fight - CanGuru. I like the pun, and I like the game mechanics haha. My favorite mode is actually the "Cooking Arcade", it's the most loyal to the original concept of the game, good ol’ chaotic fun, no hand handling, and lots of stuff to do at the same time!

Thanks for revealing that - We’ll be keeping an 👁 out for the Easter egg, along with the CanGuru boss fight and further modes and levels.

‘Boomerangs and boring red cylinders during a test stage’

Does the soundtrack sound familiar to you? 🤔 ‘B-B-Busted! Both of us are huge Crash Bandicoot fans and we just love a good marimba! With that, we ended up naming our first track "Roos Woods", as a homage to "Turtle Woods" the first track in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back’. The soundtrack was composed by Diogo and Hannibal Sigfusson. Paying homage to a memorable soundtrack 🎧🎶

Adding to the authentic Aussie adventure 🇦🇺 🐨🦘 the voice work came about -

We have two excellent voice actors - Douglas 'Technal' Bicker, and Naysy. Doug just reached out to us and wowed us with a few demo tracks. At this point, we didn't even know we were going to have voice acting, but after we heard his voice we found out we must have! After this, we reached out to Naysy! Naysy is a VR YouTuber that we have been following for a few years now, she commented on our Twitter that she was hyped about our game and we replied with an invitation for voice acting, the rest you already know!

See how reaching out and appreciating others work can help you? 😊

Shrimp and barbie

The ultimate aim with Beers and Boomerangs? Diogo tells us, ‘To break as much furniture worldwide as possible haha. We just want people to have fun playing it, plain and simple.’ Sounds good to us.

The initial release will be on PCVR, Quest, Pico, iQIYI and a PSVR2 port in 2023 (no promises!). With that disclaimer, Diogo explains that PSVR2 dev kits are not super accessible at the moment, but they are looking forward to getting their hands on one and showing Sony what they can do with it. After this interview, we hope you’ll pay attention Sony 😏

Lots of exposure has been paid to Beers and Boomerangs on various social channels.

So far Reddit seems to love it! We were the "top post of the month" in r/Oculus and in r/VRGaming. It's hard to tell if these methods end up converting to sales, but so far creating funny content with the game and sharing it around on Reddit and Twitter have been the most effective methods to get to consumers and content creators respectively.

With all these views and a positive buzz around the game, it brings up ideas on how to build and develop it further.

I am not sure if there is a single most useful information. Our design was very iterative and we constantly got feedback from our Discord community, so we ended up introducing beer, weapons, and mechanics based suggestions from our fans. We plan to keep on doing it! So if you buy the game and want to see changes or new content give us your ideas! We can't promise to make them all, but we always read them and discuss if we can do it.

Make your voice heard, and with that, Diogo adds some suggestions on how to progress. ‘Get good at throwing the boomerang haha. I always prioritize defending the drinks over serving the friends. Also - a good tip for real life as well - cook in bulk! If you are doing a burger, may as well do 3!’ Some useful life lessons there as well 🍔 👌

Always interested in the craft of making video games, especially for VR, we wanted to find out what teething problems have occurred 🦐

OMG the stabbing of the shrimps (prawns). We still feel like it isn't perfect. Making satisfying complex physics in VR is a lot of work and stabbing objects had all sort of technical shenanigans. 2 point-grabbing, rigid body joints, colliders merging. 10/10 for players, 0/10 for developers ahah.

A place in the Sun

There’s a lot of ups and downs developing and working on your passion, especially as an indie creator.

The lowest point was probably February 2022, at the time we had lacking social interaction, sun, and Inês - since she was still not working full-time on the game. So it often felt overwhelming and lonely. In March we not only got Inês working full-time on the game (she is a brilliant engineer) we also moved into Spelkollektivet. The sun had to wait a few more months, but morale surely bounced back!

With the increased morale,

The highest point (so far, before release) was showing the game in Poznan Game Arena and having hundreds of people playing it. Gamers told us that it was their favourite game in the expo, developers told us they use some of our mechanics as inspirations for their games and the event organizers told us we were the "Best International Indie Game" so we took that award home!

With things definitely looking up for the duo, VR is still a niche area within the gaming world. Diogo provides his thoughts - ‘It's an interesting market! I am very curious about how this Christmas will be. How Pico will get into the market, and how Oculus will react. We are past the "pioneers" phase of VR development but hopefully, we will arrive just in time for an interesting VR revolution in the next 2 years as hardware becomes seriously impressive and more accessible.’ Beers and Boomerangs is definitely making VR more mainstream and a part of this revolution.

With the release date looming very soon, we wanted to know what else to look out for. ‘It will be out on November 22nd! And then sales will tell haha. If the game is a hit we will probably have the resources to explore some multiplayer co-op action! If not we will just keep working on it part-time, taking suggestions from our players, fixing any bugs that appear, and adding some extra levels that we have in the "idea box"‘. Make sure to add it to your wishlists! ✔

Our conversation with Diogo concludes with him saying ‘thanks for reaching out!’.

Get your boomerang and beer coordination in order, get your barbies ready in preparation with the demo, before the full game launches on November 22nd. Have you played the demo or entered into their competition yet? If so, leave your comments below. And show your support and feedback on Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Discord and Linktree . Plus, if you didn't know IndieBloom has recently created a Patreon page where any support for what we do is always welcomed 😊