‘Clone Drone in the Hyperdome,’ a Sword-Slicing Robot-Wrecking Roguelike, Launches Today on Meta Quest

The Hyperdome awaits—and all you have to do to get there is grab a sword and slice, dice, and dismember the robotic adversaries that stand in your way. Unfortunately, in Clone Drone in the Hyperdome, they can do the same to you. Swords are dangerous, and hopping around on one foot because your leg’s off or losing a metallic hand might make it tough to win Clone Drone’s gladiator tournament, the Crashloop.

Hyperdome continues the story first set out in Clone Drone in the Danger Zone, in which you play a hapless human whose brain has been transplanted into a robot body, and you’re also trapped fighting ever-tougher metallic foes for the entertainment of evil robot overlords. Clone Drone in the Hyperdome brings the whole experience into fully immersive VR, expanding on the underlying mechanics of physics-based combat where a single sword strike can be deadly and precise slices can speed your autonomous adversaries into obsolescence.

You’re not the only person who’s been stuck in a robot body and forced to fight, either. The Crashloop has lots of participants you’ll meet along the way and who might become good friends—or bitter rivals.

We sat down with Creative Director and CEO Erik Rydeman and Narrative Lead Geoffrey Golden of Doborog Games to discuss the release of Clone Drone in the Hyperdome,creating the precise dueling mechanics that make the game unique, and finding humor in hacking through hordes of android antagonists.

Erik Rydeman: Well, I bought a Quest 2 for Christmas in 2021 and was blown away by how mature of a product it was. At that point, it was pretty hard to resist making a quick prototype to see what cutting one of our robots would be like in VR. Sword fighting in VR lit my mind on fire! And here we are, three years later!

ER: I think there are a lot of ways in which the core design of Clone Drone works even better in VR. The fact that you can freely move your weapon to target any body part works perfectly with the voxel destruction system we built.

One of the areas we’ve spent the most time on is what happens when your weapon collides with that of the opponent. Most games just play an abort animation on the enemy and call it a day, but we wanted to capture that feeling of locking swords, the push and the pull, looking for an opening.

From a physics and animation point of view, it was challenging to make that feel right. We wanted to make sure the player could trust that their blocks would actually stop the enemy’s weapon, as well as make enemies able to avoid getting insta-killed by the player coming in with the full power of a human brain and wildly swinging controllers.

ER: I think my least favorite feeling in other sword combat games is swinging my sword at an enemy and having it just land on top of their body and sit there limply. Did I deal any damage? What can I do from here? If I slide my sword along their body, am I cutting them apart? Probably not.

Another thing I often see is enemies run up to you and just stand there without doing anything, waiting for you to strike them. Or perhaps they unleash an attack after some cooldown that is poorly telegraphed and hard to block, but it doesn’t matter that much if it hits since you’re full of hit points.

There is a lack of tension in the combat. I wish more games captured this sort of feeling, of really having to respect your opponent’s ability to harm you.

Geoffrey Golden:Danger Zone and Hyperdome take place in the same universe, but on different sides of that universe. It’s a brand-new story in the world of Clone Drone!

In Hyperdome, you play as Blink, the teleporting rookie “looprunner” forced to compete in a robot death sport tournament called Crashloop. To earn their freedom, Blink needs to defeat The Captain, the egomaniacal champion of Crashloop who’s never been beaten. Blink also needs to best seven other looprunners with distinct abilities and clashing personalities. As you play and replay Crashloop, Blink learns more about how Crashloop came to be, the rivalries the looprunners have with each other, and how they can finally defeat The Captain once and for all.

GG: I applaud your humor assessment abilities, human!

Your question hits at the heart of why humor can be tricky in games. Humor relieves tension, but games naturally build tension as they get more difficult from level to level. Most of the humor in our game comes in the loading room, where the looprunners hang out between runs of Crashloop. This allows gameplay tension to build to a fever pitch throughout the Crashloop tournament, then afterwards there’s an absurd scene where robots call each other “glitches,” a release valve after an intense run.

However, I’d warn players against getting too comfortable in the loading room because some of the most intense moments in the story happen there. We like to keep players on their toes.

ER: One of the coolest things we’ve built for this game is our MoCap System—100% of the character animations for our enemies are based on movements recorded directly on a Quest headset. We set it up so that all sword attacks are recorded against a dummy to embed a deadly intent to deal damage in the animation. Then after recording some moves, we’re able to immediately fight an enemy using those moves, leading to an insanely tight iteration loop where we can instantly tweak, edit, or re-record the animations, all without taking the headset off.

The actual swordfighting techniques used are largely based on my own humble training in aikido and kendo, as well as a lot of YouTube research.

It’s been really fun trying to actually apply real martial arts principles to the enemy movements. As an example, all enemies start their attacks from outside immediate striking distance to make sure that, when they enter your range, they do so with a strike, forcing you to either block it or avoid it and counter-attack.

The player locomotion was built to support the kendo principle of “Ki ken tai ichi,” which roughly translates to the notion of attacking with your energy, sword, and body as one. The dash mechanic where the movements of your arms result in forward locomotion lets you move forward in an explosive way as part of moving your sword arms to strike. Even if the player lacks the physical space to move their physical body forward with the strike, this feeling is something we wanted to support.

I think the game has a lot of room to grow even more sophisticated, and we’ll likely improve the martial arts knowledge of our elite robots in future updates!

ER: Weapon weight played a huge part in how this is balanced. Just as in real life, you can technically wield a two-handed weapon in one hand if you’re strong enough to lift it, but you can’t move it with the same speed and precision as if you were using two hands.

As an example, if you have a greatsword in one hand, you can probably cut down a few enemies with it successfully—until you suddenly find yourself in an awkward position and get killed by an enemy coming in from the side.

ER: Yeeeeeeeeep, one day we will make a game where I can make enemies tough by saying “you deal 5,000 damage and have 5,000 hit points”, but that’s just not possible in Clone Drone. There are no hit points. You can one-shot the toughest opponent with a well-aimed strike or land 15 grazing attacks that don’t kill them.

That said, I feel like the fact that you can cut someone down in a single strike leads to an amazing feeling of being able to predict your kill before it happens. You can stab somebody in the throat, not really watch as their head flies off, and seamlessly flow into a movement to block the incoming attack from their friend.

So how do we control the difficulty? By controlling how skilled enemies are at fighting. We have systems for tweaking how fast their attacks are, how fast they transition from being blocked to launching another attack, and the different attack patterns they use. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We developed more sophisticated systems, like the degree to which enemies telegraph their attack (for example, the length of their windup), if and how they avoid your sword, and how much they move in response to you closing in on them. Some of our enemies can tell if you’re aiming your sword straight at them and try to deliberately make contact with it from a safe distance, locking you in a block or pushing your sword away.

All enemy defendroids come in three difficulties that use the same weapons and have very similar character models, but the way they move makes all the difference to how likely they are to kill you or avoid being killed.

ER: When you eliminate a looprunner, they drop their turbofist, allowing you to absorb it into either of your hands. This grants you a cool ability that you can activate with the trigger button.

Each turbofist reflects the nature of the looprunner that drops it. For example, Kata, the ninja looprunner, has a Shuriken Fist. If you defeat her and equip her turbofist, you can spray ninja stars at your opponents! Similarly, if you defeat FLAMEWAR, the punk firestarter, you’ll get a flamethrower on your wrist. Other turbofists include an Armor Fist that gives you a force field, a Hand Extension Fist for slashing enemies across the room, an Air Fist for blowing your opponents away, and a Necromancy Fist for creating robot zombies who assist you in battle!

You can equip up to two fists per run (one on each hand), as well as upgrade your fists by absorbing others into it. So Shuriken Fist plus Flame Fist equals Fire Shurikens, Necromancy Fist plus Armor Fist equals Armored Zombies, and so on.

We hope players will enjoy discovering all the fun combinations! The turbofists add another layer to combat, where you must also consider what weapon you want to pair them with. Shooting a shuriken into someone’s face is easier when wielding a small, easy-to-maneuver weapon, for example, while the Air Fist or slowing down time does not require any careful aiming.

The inspiration for the turbofists were largely born out of standing around in VR with a sword in your hand and a trigger button that didn’t do anything. We knew we wanted to add some sort of special abilities to the game, and this felt like the format that would allow the player the most control over them.

GG: My favorite weapon is the shield with a spike on it. Offense and defense, all in one! And my player tip is to swing the sword with wild abandon, as long as they’re not playing too close to a priceless Ming vase.

ER: My top combat tip would be to learn how to dash! If you can strike enemies before they close the distance, you can flow into their openings. Or if you’re struggling with sword combat, consider picking up a bow! It’s ridiculously powerful and very fun to use. :)

GG: In Danger Zone, all the voice acting is text-to-speech. In Hyperdome, we have an amazingly human voice cast with credits on Call of Duty, Helldivers, World of Warcraft, and Fallout—and every line of dialogue is fully voiced! That said, the commentators are still text-to-speech, just like in the first game. As a studio, we have a soft spot for clunky, semi-intelligible computer voices.

ER: We built Danger Zone using the Early Access approach, and seeing the community react to it along the way was instrumental in shaping it into the game it became. With Hyperdome, we waited longer before releasing it, but now we can’t wait to see players experience what we’ve built! We’re looking forward to updating the game, adding more content, and addressing things that work less well than we’ve intended, so please let us know what you think when you play it! <3

Prepare yourself to challenge the Crash Loop and dismantle some droids. Clone Drone in the Hyperdome is currently available on the Meta Horizon Store for $19.99 USD.