Quite a few things have happened since our last update, almost a month ago:
Someone from Korea (apparently) created a little video using the "Streamer Mode" that we've had in Alpha 50 (we've meanwhile changed this to just a single screen for performance reasons):
Unfortunately, I have no idea what this guy is saying but I hope he liked the game ;-) ... there's also a fairly in-depth YouTube comparison review for Holodance and Audioshield done by VR Critic:
I really enjoyed that review and some of the issues that he found already found their way into the current version of Holodance ... so ... we also released two new updates with pretty long release notes:
- April 27th: Alpha 51 - Biggest Update so far
- May 6th: Holodance Alpha 52 - Another Big Update
Some highlights:
- Completely new environments for Level 1 and 3
- Settings can now be changed inside VR
- Detailed explanation of ScoreHUD available when settings are active
- Skipping added
- Pause and Cancel added
- Explicit Player Height Calibration
- Lots of polishing and bugfixing
We also had two Vive Stations with Holodance at IM.TOP, so during that whole day we demoed Holodance to about 140 people, including HP "Cosplayers": Twitter Link (with Video)
Right now, we're at 357 units sold via Steam, which isn't mind-blowing, but it's pretty okay given that we're still in Early Access and haven't done a lot of advertising / marketing. But we have a booth at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany in August this year, and that might become pretty big.
One thing that is really nice is that we have a fairly international audience already: US 167 units, Germany 52 units, China is third with 43 units, UK 38 units, Canada 18, Australia 14, Norway and Netherlands 9 each, Switzerland, Sweden and Taiwan 5 each, Spain, Austria, Japan 4 each, 3 in France and Ireland, and we have also sold unity (2 or 1) in Belgium, Denmark, Israel, Korea, Turkey, Italy, Finland, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Thailand, Brazil and India.
And then ... last Sunday, something fairly amazing happened: Once I day, I do a Google search for Holodance limited to the last 24 hours. I saw a pretty weird video by a pretty weird guy with a rather bizarre humour (but I could laugh about it) ... and he played Holodance. I found this on a weird Website with a weird video-player. Did some more research and found that same video on YouTube ... and ... um .. that guy has 43 million subscribers. Did more research and realized: OMG, he is the YouTuber with most subscribers on the planet.
Wrote a little (humorous) posting about this on Facebook that you might like ;-)
The video itself, I'd say, is clearly NSFW, and I can see that not everyone will like that kind of humour ... but as he's playing my game (starts at 4:00), I have to put him into this posting. So here's PewDiePie, playing, among other games, Holodance, and becoming a hopeless VR addict:
So far, this did not increase views on any of my sites, let alone increase sales ... but it's good to know that by now, more than 2 million people have at least seen Holodance one time ;-)
Back to work on Alpha 53 tomorrow. Hope you enjoyed reading this ... and if you did, please comment and share!