News - SuperFly VR Launched to Online Game Platforms

A virtual reality research project that I have been working on with the UW Reality Lab Incubator was launched to Steam as an early access game.

Vive Port: SuperFly

itch.io: SuperFLy

The virtual reality action game “Superfly” was released on Steam in October and it’s doing well: Steam featured Superfly on its “New and Trending” in VR games page, it has excellent user reviews, and has sold over 1,000 copies in it’s first month. There are several Superfly fan videos on YouTube (#SuperflyVR), including a video by Ctop with over 1 million views!

The core of Superfly’s innovation – and the reason we asked them to join the Incubator – is how they treat movement within the game. The initial name of the project in the Incubator was, “Novel Forms of Locomotion in VR“. In most VR games, you move with static inputs, disconnected from any physics engine: You teleport or press a directional button and the program recalculates your position.

In contrast, players in Superfly perform an action – like flapping wings or activating hand-thrusters – and the game uses that action to calculate force and momentum in 3 dimensions. When you travel by ice trail, the trail banks to allow turns, and it persists and interacts with other objects in the game; Your webs let you swing from the buildings around you; You can use claws to grab onto objects – grab a building and you can climb it, grab a smaller object and you can pick it up and throw it.

Realistic superhero movement and interacting with the game environment are a defining part of the design.