VRFocus first reported on indie developer Block Interval and its virtual reality (VR) title Life of Lon way back in August 2015. In development for nearly three years, today marks the release of the first chapter in this fantasy adventure.
Life of Lon has been designed as a comfortable seated experience for users of all ages no matter what their abilities are. Players take on the role of Lon, who awakes from hypersleep just in time to encounter a space anomaly that sends the ship crashing towards an alien planet called Paracosma. Finding themselves under the waves, players encounter a curious creature called Yep – because of the bark it makes – which then follows them as they try to get the ship back up and running by exploring and completing environment puzzles.
Talking about the videogame’s development and the release of chapter one, Creative director and co-creator of Life of Lon, Daniel David Allen said on Steam: “For nearly 3 years, we’ve been trying to create a special kind of science fantasy journey, and we’ve had to evolve our technology to meet the changing VR landscape.”
“The vast majority of this project has been spent in R&D- learning about what will or won’t work in VR. Our biggest challenge was creating comfortable seated locomotion. We iterated through numerous approaches and tested on hundreds of people to find the right approach that would cause as little motion sickness as possible. We know that number won’t be 100%- so please accept our apologies if you don’t feel well after trying chapter 1. We’ve included comfort options in our menu- so try things out for yourself.
“We’re releasing this first chapter as a pilot of sorts- in the hope that we’ll catch the attention of an intrepid publisher or investor that would like to pick up the whole project. If you’d like to help us complete the game, simply talk about it and share it! The more traction we get, the more likely we’ll be able to finish.”
Life of Lon launches today on both headsets for free. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Life of Lon, reporting back with the latest updates.