Sometime in the past couple years, whether it was on your Oculus Rift or the Oculus Go, you found yourself deep in space piloting the most advanced space craft ever made. Your task was simple: protect the United Trade Consortium and the technology this spacecraft possesses. In this time you were dodging incoming missiles that were coming from the Tartus Liberation Front, a group that will stop at nothing to make sure you fail your mission.
With all of this action inside of a virtual reality headset, you start to believe you are in a sci-fi thriller movie with the role of protecting. Now, Oculus Quest users are going to be thrown into battle as well, and even more now than ever. The standalone power of the Oculus Quest is going to give another sense of immersion that has yet to be seen with a fun game like End Space.
Oculus reps recently sat down with Justin Wasilenko, the main developer behind this game, to see where the concept for this game came from and where he sees the game going in the future. Below, we are going to dive into what their interview had and what helped Wasilenko get to where he is now.
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What was the initial inspiration behind End Space?
Justin Wasilenko: When I was younger, my favorite games to play were flight/space simulator games. I spent a lot of my childhood sitting in a virtual cockpit flying spaceships and planes. Tie Fighter and Wing Commander have always ranked as my favorite games of all time.
My brother had shown me his Oculus DK2 that he got from backing the Kickstarter, and I was just amazed. I saw the potential for virtual reality and what it meant for the future of video games, and I wanted to be a part of it. I had never worked in the game industry before or even attempted to make a game. I was a wildland forest firefighter in the seven years before the release of End Space.
While I was in Germany visiting my brother, I met a girl who would become my future wife. That led me to move to Germany at the end of 2014. I couldn’t work as a firefighter anymore, so I started to learn Unity by watching YouTube tutorials and taught myself how to make games. For every tutorial I did, I would take what I learned and put it into my first game. Taking inspiration from my favorite childhood games, I started to build what would become End Space.
What kinds of changes have you made since the game originally debuted in 2016?
JW: I got married and had two kids 🙂 But to End Space itself? It has drastically changed over the last three years. The game first released on Gear VR when the Touchpad was the only controller. Since then, I’ve added new levels, a storyline, voice acting, localization, all new control methods, support for more platforms, better graphics and sounds. There isn’t anything remaining in the game that hasn’t been reworked since 2016. It’s been a constant learning process for me.
Are you offering cross-buy for owners of End Space on the Rift Platform?
JW: Yeah, I’m excited about offering it as an extra “thank you” for the Rift pilots that have already supported me. The price has also dropped on the Rift version down to $14.99 USD to match the Quest release pricing.
Any future updates on the roadmap you can share?
JW: End Space has been in development for over three years, and we’ve been constantly updating the game since. One of the next features in development is an infinite wave mode with a leaderboard to see how far you can make it. With the newly announced cloud save, I also want to look at being able to save your progress on Quest and pick up where you left off on Rift. Also, expect to see more missions to further the story, more weapon types, and more of everything.
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As you can tell, the release is already going to be widely adopted, regardless of the platform. With the price being dropped down to $14.99 on the Oculus Store, we can expect this game to climb to the top once again. For more VR games and news, make sure to check back at VRGear.com.
