On April 5, 2016, Rust LTD’s Anton Hand released Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, & Hand Grenades (H3VR) in Early Access on Steam after seven weeks of development on this VR sandbox game that featured a handful of guns as well as some lawn games, cooking, and ordnance. Little did anyone know that it would remain in Early Access for over a decade with hundreds of Devlogs sharing behind-the-scenes documentation and recounting various content updates of hundreds upon hundreds of guns, attachments, cartridges, toys, melee weapons, and a few dozen different game modes. Hand is still working towards the official H3VR 1.0 release, and much to the surprise of everyone on May 6th, he announced the H3VR 2 during the Creature Feature with a trailer and short featurette as well as a longer featurette on his YouTube channel.
This is quite an epic, decades-long journey, and so I wanted to catch up with Hand to hear more about the origins and early beginnings of H3VR, the artist collective of Rust LTD, and the various game design space he’s been exploring as well as the many game modes, narrative short stories, and worldbuilding that’s happened over the past decade.
One thing that Hand mentions is that H3VR has always been pigeon-holed as a VR sandbox game for guns, which is how it started (and how H3VR is still described on Steam), but it also evolved to have dozens of mini-games and even some full-fledged games that are on par with how much content is in a premiere VR game release. H3VR is now described as an “award-winning, best-selling Immersive FPS” on the Steam page for H3VR2. Hand hopes to shift the emphasis on H3VR2 as more of a tactical extraction rogue-like FPS first, and that there happens to be some sandbox features just like H3VR1.
H3VR2 will also have a much more coherent narrative and worldbuilding that is consistent throughout the entirety of the game whilst Hand describes H3VR1 as a series of short stories and poems that helped to develop the tone, characters, and lore of this Hot Dog Universe.
In the 10th H3VR Virtual Object Experiments Devlog from March 26, 2016, Hand announced H3VR would be launching on Steam He said that he’s “interested in really compelling, detailed, and precise object interactions,” which is the core theme that consistently drove the rapid iterations of experimental sandbox interactions and gameplay. But he also described his development philosophy that would continue for over a decade. He said,
And then there’s going to be the basement. And what the basement is going to be is basically my experiments. This is such a new medium that all of us who are doing VR dev are, frankly put, we’re just clawing around in the dark with this stuff in so many ways. I likened it on Twitter earlier today to making an FPS game before someone had figured out WASD controls. There are no standards. We are wildly trying everything at this point to see what works well. You know, if you’ve played any number of Vive experiments so far, almost everyone is doing input differently — doing their object interactions differently. And so I think it’s valuable both to the effort, and to myself as a developer, and the community who’s interested in these types of things to put out experiments, warts and all — without the polishing step that would eventually bring them to be more complete, if they even panned out. And so what H3VR is going to have a lot of is — and I’m going to probably be adding these on a weekly or every other week basis — various sorts of interaction and game experiments that are using the virtual objects, using the weapons in some fashion. Then based on feedback, based on what people think, and anything useful I’ve learned, some of them will be further developed into more cohesive mini games or even mini-game sequences. Who knows? But the point is to get stuff out in a rougher way to get really useful data from folks of how things are working. Is it fun? Is it too challenging? Does some aspect of the interaction system fall apart in those contexts? And so yeah! So there’s going to be a whole bunch of that.
I wanted to hear from Hand more about the origins of H3VR, his about his creative process, some of the design principles guiding it, as well as some of the narrative and worldbuilding development process. For more clues on that, then I’d recommend checking out my two previous conversations with Hand in episodes #668 and #936 as well as H3VR writer and worldbuilder / Rust LTD CEO Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz in episode #711.
Hand and the Rust LTD team are no doubt going to be historic figures in the evolution of VR gaming, and H3VR2 is shaping up to be one of the biggest releases that is on the horizon. I really respect what Hand has been able to accomplish, and we just learned this past week that he’s been secretly evolving from an indie VR lead designer, lead developer, and lead artist into a full-fledged game director overseeing the secret development of a sequel build by a team of 20 developers with funding from Meta. His creative journey is such a transformational evolution that closely tracks the evolution of the consumer VR medium itself, and so I always appreciate hearing his latest insights and more about his creative process that has produced a decade’s worth of absurdist and surrealist play.
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Music: Fatality
