Balloon Bats!

Balloon Bats began as a spinoff of my first VRChat level, named “Sky Cafe”. Players would join on the back of a wooden ship floating under a hot air balloon flying through the clouds, and the goal was to serve one another coffee. Despite my intentions, all the players agreed that their favorite moment was walking off the ship’s plank and falling into the clouds below, not serving coffee. That’s when I knew I had to make a flying game.

The next 5 months were spent in a flurry of prototypes that I would test at my local game developer’s playtesting nights. How would the players flap their arms without feeling sore in their shoulders? How could I have them turn without motion sickness? How could we rise or fall? I worked on the flying until I had 3000 visits and 300 favorites to my VRChat world. When the Quest store opened in October, I ported my game, and one month later, we were on!

The Balloon Bats Crew began in a cave. We had crash-landed our Ship, the Steren Mor 4, and needed to rebuild it in order to make our way back home. Over the course of the first few months of the game, players gained in-game wood as currency to use to purchase cosmetics. The wood served a dual purpose as we finally made our ship and headed to the next level, a Swamp level, for Halloween!

In the swamp, we explored a pivot to becoming more of a survival game like many of the top games on the store today. However, we quickly realized that the effortless freedom of flight made obstacles like brambles cumbersome and boring. When you can fly over any obstacle, why would you want to slow down to stop on the ground to clear it?

Our players enjoyed playing the game, but tended to hover near the spawn zone where they could engage in conversation with other players. They didn’t end up exploring the world we were developing because there was nothing to do. While we were proud of the social dynamics that we had brought with our community from VRChat, we needed something new. We decided to fly our ship back to the OG cave map.

Over the course of the Start Developer Competition, we decided to focus on our game modes. The focus was to keep the player in flight as long as possible, and use our game modes as an opportunity to force the players to compete and show off their flying skills.

We added a Free-for-all mode (First player to pop 10 balloons wins), a race mode (first player to reach the end wins), a lava mode (If all players together reach 100 balloons, they win), and a maze (find the end to win). For each of these, we had a new variety of obstacles, like spider webs and spikes. As a result, we’ve seen our player retention numbers and average playtime grow significantly!

Built With

• c#
• node.js
• normcore
• postgresql
• unity