Oculus Start Member Jaakko Asikainen Shares the Development Process Behind Cave Digger 2

Cave Digger 2 Game Director Jaakko Asikainen is a member of Oculus Start, a program created for developers who have either launched or are close to releasing a VR application. Oculus Start provides qualifying developers with access to hardware, developer support, a community of like-minded VR developers as well as software-related savings so you can focus on what's really important—creating inspired VR applications.

We spoke with Jaakko Asikainen about the development of Cave Digger 2: Dig Harder, the forthcoming sequel to the original Cave Digger⁠, a weird west mining game with a quirky indie style.

It was an enjoyable one and a challenge both—it unlocked the experience for us while demanding a lot I hadn’t even thought about. It enabled us to create Cave Digger 1 and realize the vision I had at the time (the Train Update).

The excellent Oculus support has always been there for us, even back when we at VRKiwi were total nobodies. I don’t think I’d be making games currently if it hadn’t been for Oculus Start.

Cave Digger 1 is basically an indie Cinderella story. After lots of luck, persistence and late nights it was fairly unreal seeing my first VR game appear in Top Quest Sellers along with Beat Saber and SUPERHOT VR. Lots of new players to interact with and get feedback from! Also our recent visibility campaign made us pass 1 million dollars in revenue.

This is a story that hasn’t been told and can’t be told by mainstream titles. This is the chance. There is something that can’t be explained—the inspiration of a lonely explorer in a deserted tundra while the Northern Lights are whirling, humming, booming, up in the sky above. Following the footsteps of your predecessor, seeing the effects of unbridled greed on Nature and unlocking the mystery of the Valley.

That has been the cornerstone of my vision.

As an indie we had to learn to do a lot with little. Cave Digger 1 had very restricted resources, which naturally caused limitations but also made us be creative with what we had.

But for Cave Digger 2: Dig Harder I had enough resources to add multiplayer, combat, a storyline, procedurally generated mining runs and full object interaction. It’s been a wonder watching all the elements come together. This game really is a monster.

Yes. In Cave Digger 2 there is a lot about environmentalism not out of necessity but because that is the way it went. We have mined the thoughts of Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, David Attenborough, Carl Sagan, Pentti Linkola and Sitting Bull.

It is a difficult subject and there is no reason to preach, but since this is what was on my mind, this is what’s in the game.

So many things we had to create from scratch. Room generation pipelines took a lot of time to get right, from the designer’s greybox to the artist’s modeling and then on to the level designer’s desk for decoration. That took about five iterations.

Also our Run Generator was a big challenge—I think of it as a storyteller, which tries to tell a memorable story by creating a themed mining run each time. Sometimes rich, sometimes deadly, sometimes longer and sometimes more labyrinthine—something to stay in the player’s mind and create a strong return hook.

Multiplayer with Photon Unity Networking was a big learning experience - it was funny when we enabled prop synchronization between players and suddenly frame rates went to low digits due to 20,000 objects being synchronized each frame.

But even with all that, after one month of pre-production and six months of prod, we successfully released a very presentable multiplayer demo in June.

The core of our art direction has always been a rough, punk attitude. We have our concept and comic book artist, who basically grew up on Mike Mignola. Our Art Director is a big fan of dieselpunk, so everything is kind of ramshackle and rickety. As the theme is Man’s subjugation of Nature, there are big, polluting engines everywhere.

Very much so. Audio spatialization in the caves is a thing we need to get perfect for setting the mood, and also for the mechanics. The music has always been in a unique spot—for Cave Digger 1 the style was mostly Americana with Morricone pastiches, but then there are also sludge metal songs. For Cave Digger 2, our composer is using a balalaika, an accordion and an upright bass. It will be something special.

This seems obvious but plan beforehand. If you port from PCVR to Quest afterwards, it will be a slog. Write your own shaders and test your perf during your pipeline setup.

Node based shader editors like Amplify Shader or Shader Graph are life savers, however sometimes you have to dive into writing/customizing your own. We made a custom Lit shader which uses a cubemap for custom fog, has cell shaded lighting and does triplanar and stochastic texturing.

I’m proud of how much of a graphical leap we have made from the first game.

Also one useful thing to optimize shaders was to combine emission maps into base texture alpha channels. Naturally we used the excellent Oculus Optimization Guides as our bibles.

In Cave Digger 1, I tried to retain my sense of old skoolness, but this made certain things too opaque for some players. This time we focused more on educating the player with tutorials. It is very handy to use Quest Casting to record test sessions when refining your tutorials.

As Cave Digger 1 was our very first VR game, it was a whole lot of experimentation. We didn't have a budget for paid ads at the beginning, so we had to make sure to do lots with the little we had. Community building takes ages but really pays off in the long run. We bonded with the diggers all over the world, listened to them and reciprocated with quality content.

We also noticed that the game was quite streamer-friendly and contacted hundreds of content creators who might like Cave Digger. Thanks to their content and interest, we managed to get +50 million views on YouTube, using just goodwill and communication. This is something that we are retaining for Cave Digger 2, with lots of wonderful and weird objects to find. Also this time we are adding Twitch integration, so that should be a lot of fun both for streamers and their followers.

Play to your advantages, know your team. Focus on object interaction, avoid interaction disappointment at all costs. Stay in touch with the dev community and ask questions. Stay informed on what others are doing.

Thanks for reading and please come chat with us on Discord⁠! Would be cool to get some collaboration going.