Developer Q&A: How Ready At Dawn Used Oculus Platform Multiplayer Features to Raise Its Game
Oculus VR
If you caught Connect 2021 on October 28, you heard more about our latest Oculus Platform multiplayer features that make it easier for your users to get together, stay together, and have fun in VR, wherever they are in the Oculus ecosystem.
These features—including Destinations and Group Presence, Roster, Invite to App, and Invite Link—let you tap into the broader Platform’s concurrency, which enhances social interactions within your app and lets your biggest fans invite others to join them; you foster a unique multiplayer experience where players feel physically present with their friends in-app.
Echo VR was one of the first apps to integrate our multiplayer APIs and saw some incredible effects. Download the full PDF case study to see how they did it and the impact it had on their app:
We spoke with Ready At Dawn Project Lead David Neubelt to learn more about how their incorporation of these features impacted their community’s growth—making it easier than ever to bring friends along and clash in the Echo Arena.
Tell us a little about yourself and how you support Echo VR.
David Neubelt: I’m David Neubelt, Project Lead for Echo VR at Ready At Dawn. My current scope is guiding the game’s direction, but I’ve been at the company for over 16 years working as an engineer on AAA console games. Back in 2016, I had the opportunity to try out the DK2 and ported our engine to work with VR. From initially floating in a demo level, we created our single-player game Lone Echo. Halfway through the project, I partnered with my coworker Jacob Copenhaver on a game jam to add multiplayer, which spun off into Echo VR as a standalone title.
What kind of game is Echo VR?
DN: Part of Lone Echo’s lore includes robots publicly competing in simulated televised competitions. In Echo VR, you play as one of those robots, where you and your friends can team up to compete in high-energy, zero-g combat and sports games. The game started casually with team vs. team play, but in some cases evolved into professional tournament leagues for VR esports.
How did you determine which multiplayer features to add to the game?
DN: We listen to our community through social media, user reviews, public play sessions, 1-on-1 community member conversations, surveys, and Discord channels for our core users. We internally review that information to prioritize what’s best for our community’s gaming experience. Also, my teammates and I actively participate in competitive leagues like the VR Master League to connect with our core community and understand their needs.
Why did you and the team incorporate Oculus’ Platform multiplayer features into Echo VR?
DN: Traditionally, we built our own social features like in-game friends list, VOIP solution, and party solution because we wanted to tailor the experience. However, this meant we were missing out on opportunities to attract new players and make our existing players’ experience easier via Platform social features. For example, integrating group presence showed users who didn’t play our game that their friends were playing it in their feeds. Additionally, integrating destinations let users join actively playing friends from their phones. We couldn’t write these features ourselves, so leveraging Platform features helped us reach a broader audience.
How did these Platform features impact Echo VR?
DN: Beyond showing our app to a broader audience, the biggest benefit we’ve seen is that Platform features (since they’re universal) help new players quickly understand how to group up and play together. Previously, those users would have had to learn our unique party system, which created friction and sometimes lost players. On a related note, we’ve also seen our competitive community regularly leverage the ‘Invite Link’ feature that let’s them send a deep link to the group, so we’re investing in ways to further simplify the process so players can quickly share links and play.
What feature stood out to you?
DN: We recently integrated the ‘Invite to App’ feature into our game, which lets users invite friends and in-game connections to multiplayer sessions. For our players, this meant they could bring up their in-game arm computer, click ‘Invite’ to pull up the rRoster (another Platform feature), and quickly invite users. This was easy to implement, and we saw that feature led to a 10% increase in user sessions with a friend and a 2% increase in weekly active players—pretty good!
How easy was it to integrate these features into the app?
DN: The APIs are straightforward, but I strongly recommend an order-of-operations. Start with the foundational work to integrate destinations and group presence so your game is surfaced better on the Store and mobile app. The basic concept is your game will have destinations whether that’s a social lobby or a match, and users will have their group presence set to their lobby session id they’re in and mark themselves as joinable if they’re in an area that’s joinable by a group. Once that’s done, it’s as simple as calling the ‘Invite to App’ dialogue (check out the step-by-step documentation with use cases and test cases).
What advice would you give other developers who may benefit from Platform multiplayer features?
DN: I’d highly recommend getting Destinations and Group Presence into your app first. They’re easy to integrate, enable a host of surfacing on the Oculus Platform, and immediately benefit your app.
Add Roster, Invite to App and Invite Link to the mix and your users can coordinate with one another more quickly to jump into games faster.
Finally, integrate features like Rejoin, Webhooks, and Invokable Error Dialogs. This way, you’re adding functionality on top of the strong foundation you’ve set yourself up with.
For information about how to integrate these features into your apps, please check out our documentation. We’ll be adding even more Oculus Platform multiplayer features, including a Quick Invite API and Ask to Join. Stay tuned for more updates on these and other features coming soon.
If you have any questions, please let us know on the Developer Forums.
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