You can now climb Mount Olympus in Walkabout Mini Golf.
Mount Olympus in Walkabout Mini Golf is the game's 32nd course, following Viva Las Elvis in January. According to studio head Lucas Martell it is far larger than Walkabout's previous giant-sized course, 2023's Temple At Zerzura.
Here's the official description:
High above the Aegean Sea lies the legendary realm of the gods and goddesses. Here, the Olympians converge to determine the fate of mortals—through an epic miniature golf odyssey. Putt your way through intricate temples, mythical landscapes, and challenging hazards. But beware: your skills will soon be tested by the Olympian Council, who will decide if you’re worthy of victory or destined to face the wrath of the gods!
On the path up Mount Olympus you'll encounter temples and offerings with icons of the main Greek pantheon including Zeus, Apollo and Artemis. Our tour with Walkabout creator Lucas Martell is also our longest ever, clocking in at 28 minutes of behind-the-scenes details.
Watch it here:
I recently hosted Mighty Coconut senior art director Don Carson for an in-depth discussion about the design process in the game. He notes they aim to "over deliver" with a layered design approach that lasts more than a year seeing teams handing off courses to one another in rotation. The Coconuts, as the employees of the studio are called, number in the dozens today.
Hot on the heels of Elvis producing the highest single sales day in the game's nearly five-year history, will players again come back to Mount Olympus and continue the trend of grabbing a few more from the store?
You can find Walkabout on all major headsets as well as iOS.
Camouflaj is beginning to move on from Batman: Arkham Shadow.
The development studio behind UploadVR's Game of the Year for 2024 will continue with bug fixes for the game, but the Batman: Arkham Shadow team is starting to close the book on this chapter of the Arkham saga starting at version 1.4, Camouflaj studio head Ryan Payton revealed to us during an interview.
The 'Game of the Year' update marks the addition of an Extreme difficulty setting, plus a variant of New Game+ called “I Am The Knight” which “restarts your campaign if you trigger a Game Over.” Completing the game in the mode unlocks a “gold-accented variant of your Batsuit and gadgets”.
There's also three new Predator Maps, an Infinite Combat challenge inspired by the “Scarecrow Nightmare” from Arkham Asylum, more than 500 bug fixes, six new Echo collectibles and more.
Meta-owned Camouflaj released Arkham Shadow in October 2024 with monthly updates following until now.
“We're making interesting discoveries. It's really difficult. It's one of the reasons why it can take a long time for some of these VR games to come out,” Payton said. “I feel like when I go into a flat screen game in a world that I'm very interested in, all I can think about the entire time is – I wish I was in VR for this. It feels like I'm looking at this world through the window rather than being in the world.”
What's Next For Camouflaj?
Camouflaj's technical talent demonstrates an ability to develop top tier immersive gaming experiences within severe technical constraints progressing through:
There are many ways we could have approached the topic with Payton over a half-hour conversation this week. I did my due diligence by tossing it into the space between us as I sat in the UploadVR Studios from New York, Don punched Gotham's villains from Missouri, and Payton delivered his comments from Japan.
It was all a bit bittersweet until we started imagining ourselves becoming Wolverine.
Superpowers In VR
WayneTech's Rescue Vision looks a lot like Anduril's EagleEye. Marvel's What If On Apple Vision Pro shows a path forward for embodying VR superpowers based on hand tracking, while Ace Virtual Shooting put a “handset” in my home last week for target shooting with the equivalent weight of a firearm.
Gamers on Quest today use held controllers but hand tracking is improving steadily. There's a new hyper-sensitive generation of watches and bands like the one demoed with Meta's Orion glasses that can do very interesting things paired with immersive VR, too. Deadpool & Wolverine as a co-op VR game, for instance, could see a player with controllers becoming the dual-wielding shooting mercenary Deadpool while their teammate with open air hand tracking (and optionally enhanced by haptic bands) could become the brutally physical Wolverine.
Imagine the feeling metal claws that can seem to feel like they're sliding out from your wrist. That's been the dream of Arlen, one of our VR Gamescast viewers, and we covered the idea on our last VR Gamescast episode.
Of course, Camouflaj doesn't have to make a superhero VR game next, and they could make anything. Even though Payton says he would love to keep working on Arkham Shadow - and we would love a VR sequel to this standout VR game - Rocksteady is reportedly returning to this particular superhero franchise for flatscreen.
Meta is obviously in transition too, with the ongoing push to Horizon Worlds and Meta Connect in September this year will likely represent the company's biggest slate of announcements yet. So it seems we'll have to wait and see what Mark Zuckerberg and his team decide to do next with this accomplished development group.
“I think we've probably done over 10,000 code check ins into the game since launch,” Payton told us. “I think it's been somewhere around 2,000 to 3,000 bugs have been resolved, and that's not even kind of talking about the content that the team just desperately wanted to make or add to the game, including the new post credit scene at the end of the game, we added a new cinematic to the game with 1.3, all these different challenge maps. We're just so passionate about this game. We love this game, and it doesn't hurt that the game was received well. So, it's just like this kind of positive feedback loop, this like flywheel that we have here. And yeah, it is bittersweet.”
Watch the full discussion here:
And watch other recent devcasts below:
Job Simulator developer Andrew Eiche noted the fold-up bed in his room
Darknet & Ironstrike developer E McNeill gamed out his bitcoin losses
Airspace Defender creator Rafael Brocado introduced us to the absolutely delightful elemental education experience Tablecraft.
Don Carson played Walkabout Mini Golf during the pandemic in 2020.
In 2025, he puts on a VR headset in his Oregon home to sketch places he wants people to visit and enjoy from their own homes beginning sometime in 2026.
Carson works as senior art director for a team called Mighty Coconut that's steadily grown over his relatively brief tenure.
The Coconuts now number in the dozens.
Every seven weeks or so their creative engine releases a new destination priced just under $4. The last was Walkabout's 31st course, Viva Las Elvis, and we toured the place with its lead artist.
Globally across stores from Meta, Apple, Sony, Valve, and Bytedance, Walkabout players return to the Welcome Shack to find a new course available. According to Mighty Coconut, when players did that for Elvis in January it created the highest day of revenue ever for them, with players buying Elvis and continuing the journey by grabbing a few more courses too.
That it's unusual enough to be newsworthy for me to mention Martell uses no outside investment to employ these artists says something about the forces shaping the VR market. Here, you're reading about a company called Mighty Coconut making one of the best paid multiplayer VR games ever conceived, employing dozens of deeply skilled artists who basically only come together in the physical world when it is time to brainstorm new ideas.
I don’t care what measure analysts use to apply the label “unicorn“ to a certain class of endeavor. To me, Walkabout is a VR unicorn if only because you can see in recent courses the continuous steady ripening of a platform. You can feel it looking around at the smoke in the lights of Elvis or when plucking a giant guitar string there.
“We don’t have any specific openings at the moment,” Mighty Coconut's Job page says, though they do post an email address.
I include that because I know people out there are looking for jobs. You can read Quest To Horizon from my colleague Henry Stockdale. We also have a large body of links reporting on the many layoffs at a large number of studios. Some of them used to employ more people than Martell does for Walkabout.
What I've done is invite Carson for an intimate 1:1 voice conversation from his home in Oregon to mine in New York, hosted by my colleague Beck from Canada in the UploadVR Studios.
One comment I wanted to pull out for you from Carson:
“Some uninitiated person who sees Walkabout Mini Golf on the surface could easily eye roll at how simple it is what we're offering. But then they experience it. And especially when they experience it with friends, they'll say something else is going on here.”
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“And my answer is, yes, it is, and it is by design and by listing out these principles, we're not showing off what we do, we're saying to other world builders, 'you can do this too. We give you permission to think about these things as you're designing and not because it's a secret, but because these principles thought in this order actually can create really immersive loved gifts to your audience.'”
“Why do I like this so much? Why is this so engaging? Why is this so immersive? It shouldn't be. It looks like Legos. And yet I'm...being evoked. I'm having emotions. Well, a lot of that is based upon these simple rules and the same tricks and same techniques that have been used successfully in image making, movie making, film making, and ride making.”
If you use a camera on a recent iPhone or iPad to scan the code below you should be able to see the Upload logo floating in your room.
I used Apple's Air Drop feature to send the link directly to Apple Vision Pro where I viewed the object floating in my office from the headset. I had previously downloaded the new Scenery app to Vision Pro to make that work, then I opened the link and selected a spot on my floor for the object to float above.
Here's the Upload logo in your room:
This particular bit of "scenery" looks really nice on mobile phones because it was specifically designed for that. The Vision Pro, meanwhile, doesn't let third parties scan these kinds of codes in passthrough yet, even though Apple uses the feature to load your prescription for the headset.
We'll be very curious to see what kind of reach there ends up being for this method of distributing content to headsets as Apple, Google, Meta and others integrate computer vision into their latest products in different ways. Android and Quest support is in the works, Scenery devs say, with a WebXR viewer listed as "coming soon" on the company website.
Andrew Eiche didn't exactly have to interview for his job at Owlchemy Labs back when they were finishing Job Simulator.
The question was whether he wanted to move to Austin, Texas.
Speaking with us roughly a decade after making that move with a series of credits to his name including some of the most used VR games of all time, Eiche said he called into our stream this week from a guest room in his home equipped with a bed that can fold up in case he needs space for VR.
"I got accused of never being offline," Eiche says. "Work is one thumb tap away."
Eiche's hour and a half conversation with us amounted to a kind of "career retrospective" looking back at a decade in VR development, following our first such broadcast with Darknet and Ironstrike creator E McNeill.
Playgrounds For Roleplay
The stream started with Don Hopper in the background playing single-player games Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, and Cosmonious High, as I talked with Eiche from the UploadVR Studios. By the end of the show the three of us were gathered around the campfire in Dimensional Double Shift as Eiche shared with us a clever strategy when you're low on time and have too much work to do in VR.
Lighting your own simulated digits on fire quickly cooks held items.
Humor that players make for themselves is the most potent kind of joke in their VR games, Eiche suggested over our play session. As Don played the games and Eiche shared anecdotes, like the rat exterminator who came to Owlchemy's office and suggested they should have been making League of Legends, we started to understand what changed about game mechanics and roleplay across each of the titles.
Eiche's conversation with UploadVR comes during a turbulenttime for the VR and gaming markets. He spoke on the record with UploadVR recently for our article covering Meta's evolution "From Quest To Horizon", so during this time with Eiche we focused on the games at hand instead of that broader conversation.
Still, you can see us begin to touch on the subject at various points. We talk about Horizon Worlds' reliance on controllers and mobile input, for instance.
Overall, the stream shows us how Google's key investment in hand interactions from 2017 delivers us in 2025 a path forward for VR that relies only on your hands for a safe social playground online.
I ended the conversation asking Eiche to speak with us about the future of VR as a medium. While we encourage you to check out the whole stream for a look at a path through 10 years of VR development, I thought it worth clipping that out for us to reflect on.
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"What you're really going to see happen is, when you can combine the experiences that keep you engaged in the immersive, that's when the magic's going to happen because the converse of immersive is every time I have to look at my phone or my watch, we've also failed, right? So how can I have these fully immersive spaces and continue to engage with my two dimensional workflows without missing a beat in these spaces? That's the entryway to mass market. That's where this whole thing goes. As people go, wow, I'm experiencing one of the really cool immersive films that are out there, or I'm doing Puzzling Places, right? And I get a message in Puzzling Places or Walkabout. I get a message, right? Those games are kind of in the zone games. And you go, oh, I have to answer this Slack message. Right now, I have to take off my headset and look at my phone...but if I could just pop up Slack, answer it, close it, the game doesn't even exit, and I'm off and running. That's incredible."
"And then you know what's gonna happen? I'm going to exit Walkabout later on and go, well, I'm already in my headset. And I already know how to use Slack in my headset. Why not just keep using it? That's how the iPad worked. That's how the watch stuff worked. That's how the phone worked. That's the playbook. That's where the future is. And I think we're close to it. And the real question looking forward is, can we create a space for the 2D content to exist within the immersive without becoming so obsessed with the 2D content that we forget what made this platform so special?"
Make some space on your desk for fingerpainting some notes with TouchDesk on Apple Vision Pro.
When calibration is set right for your desk, TouchDesk can feel like a bit of magic in the way it embraces Apple's visionOS operating system. Unlike many Vision Pro apps, the app fully supports Apple's multitasking capabilities as a shared space app. So unlike FigminXR, which fully overtakes the headset's system, TouchDesk can sit in the background as a kind of augmentation for your desk, effectively turning it into a touch-sensitive surface and display you might use to jot some notes while doing something else.
You could, for example, quickly write down a combination code you find in the environment while playing a game like Myst in flatscreen.
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The app is also a powerful demonstration of hand occlusion for the virtual content you create on the desk's surface. The effect of covering a sketch with your hand can be fee like peek-a-boo, surprising yourself to reveal the content underneath when you move your hand away again. You can sketch something out on your desk in mixed reality by directly touching the surface like fingerpaint, or do a kind of gesture-directed drawing that works in full VR too.
While I sat on the moon with a movie in the background and my Mac there with me in ultrawide, TouchDesk essentially transported my desk there with me as a surface to draw on that I couldn't even see.
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On Quest headsets, we've seen innovative apps like Pencil use Meta's controllers as paperweights to sync up the location of virtual outlines on physical paper, providing a surface to trace anything and practice the basic steps of drawing. While that app assumes the use of a traditional pencil for sketching, here you use your finger directly on the desk.
TouchDesk developer easybreezy on X responded to UploadVR's messages to acknowledge many areas for improvement after their "MVP", or minimum viable product. Future features planned include import and export, tilting boards and adding text or images.
Easbreezy wrote that multitasking "allows me to organize my thoughts while using TouchDesk, operate my ultra-wide Mac screen, and use other apps simultaneously! When I'm not using TouchDesk, I can minimize it to a corner (click the icon in the top left corner of the board to collapse it) and quickly reopen it when needed."
"I am currently working on providing more assistance when users drag and drop the board while maintaining the shared space. I'm also exploring an immersive space mode where the board can be automatically placed. Users will be able to choose between these two methods."
Easybreezy tells UploadVR they are based in Suzhou, China, and resigned from ByteDance last October to independently develop apps for Apple Vision Pro. I asked if AI was used in the making of TouchDesk:
"I occasionally consult ChatGPT for programming issues. It’s a great assistant and has helped me solve many mathematical and programming problems that I wasn’t familiar with (my previous role was as a product designer, so I’m not highly skilled in programming). However, I’m not currently using tools like Cursor for AI assistance. I might explore using such tools in the future.
You can find TouchDesk - Desktop Canvas on the Apple App Store.
SideQuest makes third-party software some owners of Quest headsets use to load up custom home spaces, classic games modded for VR support, and other unofficial content. The software relies on a component of the Android ecosystem, ADB, for managing a standalone VR headset from a companion device. To use the feature with Meta headsets you also have to specify you're a developer to install it.
We confirmed the layoffs with SideQuest CEO Shane Harris during a live episode of VR Download. Harris told us the process is still ongoing and asked to give us details next week.
We recently joined SideQuest's Banter social software to learn about their AI generation experiments. What we saw in there was an impressive proof of concept for voice to 3D object generation, coming just a few days before the layoffs.
We've asked Harris how many have been let go in total and will have more next week once we've verified more information.
If you have information you'd like to share with UploadVR you can reach us via tips@uploadvr.com. We don't respond to all messages, but we do make use of that information and thank those who share facts openly with us.
Meta responded to developer concerns over discoverability and sales on its platform with a blog post detailing the rise of in-app purchases and free-to-play content.
A blog post from Meta's Samantha Ryan, VP of Metaverse Content, claims "people spent more time on average in Quest 3S devices than any other headset at launch" and "total payment volume on the platform rose 12% in 2024, driven by significant growth of in-app purchases."
The figure gives useful context to our in-depth report talking with nearly two dozen developers struggling with visibility on Meta's platform. Meta's blog post terms these dev works "premium" products among free Horizon Worlds destinations, as Meta transitions toward supporting Horizon OS with third-party hardware in addition to the company's own Quest headsets.
"We don’t think F2P will replace premium apps — both models are likely to coexist," Ryan wrote. "These models are fighting for a share of consumer wallets and as competition heats up, we’re committed to fostering an ecosystem where all kinds of business models can succeed."
You can check out the full post on Meta's site from Ryan, who joined the company about a year ago to "lead the growth and evolution of our software strategy for the metaverse".
The post suggests "young people" are a "growing share of new users" and "contributing to the rise of free-to-play titles" as well as in using Horizon Worlds.
"This shift signals a growing opportunity for new business models," Ryan wrote. "A broader range of people are buying Quests, and this expansion has changed some of the tenets of our ecosystem that were previously taken for granted. It has also created important new opportunities for developers and creators."
The post also mentions a 10% rise in time users spent in media apps, with Amazon Prime added last year to quickly become a "top 10 2D app by time spent on the platform".
"In 2024, existing Meta Quest owners drove a wave of device sales as they upgraded from earlier models, accounting for 27% of Quest 3 and 20% of Quest 3S users for the year," Meta noted. "These customers have high expectations for fidelity and gravitate to premium titles that feature high production value, and we continue to see strong performance for titles like The Thrill of the Fight 2 and Contractors Showdown that appeal to this audience."
The majority of new devices sold in 2024, Meta says, "were people getting their first Quest headset. As so many newcomers enter the market, the well-known attributes of VR enthusiasts no longer represent the full Quest userbase."
The post also recaps a number of recent updates and tests, like changes to the store interface to makes store apps "more visible on the front page of the Horizon mobile app" as well as "enabling developers to opt-in to platform sales".
"To reach younger audiences looking for fun, social, free-to-play experiences, we’re expanding the ways you can build and monetize in Horizon Worlds," the post notes.
Walkabout Mini Golf development studio Mighty Coconut told UploadVR that 50% of its revenue is from paid DLC content, with January being the best DLC sales month ever for the company.
"In-app purchases are incredibly important for revenue but also for keeping players engaged and coming back for fresh new experiences and worlds to explore," Walkabout creator Lucas Martell said. "It keeps things active and alive, and has allowed us to expand the game far beyond our wildest dreams."
We've still got some unanswered questions about the direction of Meta's ecosystem and will be following up in the days ahead.
Ahoy! From Picardy is an invitation to start again in spatial storytelling.
The project from Daniel Jones is available now on Apple Vision Pro headsets priced $5.99. The story Jones tells here made me laugh and cry in its 16-minute runtime, and I recommend it to Vision Pro owners as a standout example of a story playing out in space with the lightest interaction to progress the story.
After Apple's own immersive content, which includes captured media like the Super Bowl, and NBA games, a performance by The Weeknd, and the fully scripted immersive short film Submerged, I'm likely to put guests in my headset through Ahoy! From Picardy to give them a powerful introduction to spatial storytelling. While Job Simulator is always a great introduction to VR as well, particularly with hand tracking, I might actually make Ahoy! From Picardy the first thing I put people inside when they try Apple's headset. That's because I can watch along more easily on a nearby device than I can with Apple's DRM'd content. You can watch about a minute of the story on this little island below, featuring some of its memorable music, because the app didn't restrict capture.
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I haven't been affected this deeply by spatial storytelling since Dear Angelica, and the poetry here in Picardy will sit with me a long while. Jones' project is a strong example of what's possible when you combine so many different art forms tailored for the free exploration of a single viewer. I can't remember leaning in to cry before, but I did here, and walking around the diorama-scale story is a wonder too.
I'll not spoil too much more about this tale, which is described as a "music-driven, linear narrative short film" by its creators with "subtle interactive elements" and a movable stage that can be repositioned to view from any angle. The app's description notes:
"This project embraces groundbreaking techniques to celebrate the arrival of spatial storytelling-a world of light layered over our physical world. It combines hand-made physical models (3D-scanned into the digital space), hand-painted backdrops, and elegantly simplified characters with hand-painted textures-all creating a uniquely warm and approachable experience."
I would like to see some better transitions included as there seemed to be a jarring few seconds between a few of the scenes, as assets seemed to load. It is a minor complaint, though, and while the experience overtakes your headset by disallowing multitasking, Picardy makes use of that focus to utter delight. I’m unlikely to boot up AHOY! again for myself unless they add more content, but the story works as is.
