There are many VR games out there that do things really well. Gorn for its melee combat. Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades for its rendition of guns. But what the team at Stress Level Zero has done in the past two years with Boneworks looks like it combines them all for what appears to be an amazing VR experience.
Stress Level Zero has a few games on the VR market that are pretty good. With Boneworks, they're leveraging the Knuckles controller to really give you unprecedented control over grabbing. For example, you can pick up a crowbar with two hands just by squeezing the controllers. But, what's really cool is you can slide one hand down the crowbar by just relaxing your grip strength on the hand you want to move and keeping a stronger grip on the other.
Another cool thing the video shows you along with the impressive finger tracking is improved accuracy you can have in throwing objects because of the tracking. It is hard to throw objects in VR games sometimes because every game seems to have their own way to judge when the perfect release point is for the optimal throwing trajectory. Finger tracking with the Knuckles controller should make it a lot easier to do and feel more natural.
Below are two videos showing off Boneworks, coming in 2019. The first is the Steam trailer, but the one that really gets into detail is the Node channel demo of the game. Brandon Laatsch is one of the talents for the channel, but he's also a developer for Stress Level Zero. He explains a lot of their decisions in developing the game and what makes this different from other VR games out there. If you've never seen a video by Brandon talking about the design of VR games, you should really check them out to get some more idea on VR game development.
Boneworks looks incredible and I'm hoping that with the 2019 release, the Knuckles controller will also finally get their release this year.
