Come Out Swinging: Mech Brawler ‘UNDERDOGS’ Now Available on Meta Quest

Wrap yourself in five tons of metal and go smashing through a dark scene of underground mech fights. Bash, crush, maul, and rip apart enemy bots and mechs—it’s full-on metal-on-metal violence in this physics-based mech brawler. Gear up with 100+ items and power tools, hire hackers and saboteurs, and hustle and deal with the gangsters and psychos who run these streets as you claw your way up the food chain. This is the premise of UNDERDOGS, which launches for Meta Quest 2, 3, and Pro—checks watch—now.

We’ve seen cockpit-based mech brawlers in VR in the past, but with its cel-shaded art style, gritty atmosphere, and arm-based locomotion, UNDERDOGS stands poised to set itself apart from what’s come before.

We sat down with One Hamsa Game Director Dave Levy and Tech Engineer & Producer Omer Perry to learn more.

Omer Perry: I’ll start. My name is Omer Perry. We have various roles on the team, so I do a lot of engineering, sometimes I do game design. We’re all very, very versatile.

Dave Levy: He’s an engineer who’s doubling as a producer rather than a producer who’s doubling as an engineer.

OP: Yeah. It started with engineering. I initially joined One Hamsa after three years at Magic Leap. I was fascinated by this medium. It was about 2017 when I joined Magic Leap, and I was fascinated by the new world that is opening up. And I think now the seeds that I saw being planted there are starting to show, and I really hope what we’re seeing right now is the beginning of a new era for VR.

DL: I’m Dave Levy. My background is visual effects and digital arts even though I’ve always wanted to be in video games. There was just no industry here in Israel in video games when I was coming into the workforce. I actually found notebooks at my parents’ house from first grade where I’m making inventories of weapons and their stats and things like that and inventing names of territories and factions and make-believe worlds. First grade, fourth grade, I have all these dossiers. So I’ve really always wanted to do that, and I had my first opportunity to work in gaming in 2012. I worked at Ubisoft for a couple of years in Sweden. Then I moved back to Israel and did some work in mobile development, but I always wanted to do my own thing.

When we found each other, the founders, it was very clear that, “Alright. It’s time we can start gearing up towards making our own thing happen in gaming.” That’s kind of the background.

DL: I’ll start with the studio as a whole. I think we actually didn’t know we were a VR studio at first. We started out with two projects: one for mobile and one for VR, which ended up being Racket: Nx. It started out as just a technical demo, and very quickly it became obvious that for a new studio just starting out that was very interested in being on the leading edge, VR is the place to be. We were new, the medium is new. There’s no rules that we have to go by. It’s an open playing field, and we really like the possibility of having no conventions as of yet.

We’re figuring things out for ourselves and helping shape something new. That’s something that always kind of really tempted us and just financially as well—you’re a new studio, and you can either join a super saturated market or try making room for yourself in a new emerging market. So it was kind of a no-brainer for us both creatively and business-wise.

OP: I would also add that I think there’s just the physicality of the offerings. I don’t know why exactly, but there’s something about embodiment in VR that is very appealing to every one of us on the team. We’re all gamers, and we all have backgrounds in different types of games, but after playing one session of UNDERDOGS or any other game that you’re being physically immersed into, there’s something special that isn’t being brought out by other games.

DL: We all really love games, and at the same time we are very aware of how games and technology tend to be sedentary in a lot of ways. We notice this on ourselves because we’re gamers and because we work in front of a computer all day.

I don’t think we’re there yet, but there’s a promise in VR where I can take this medium that I really love and just make it more human and more human-friendly—better for this machinery that is me. In the period before we started UNDERDOGS, when we could still think about philosophical stuff, that was one of the big things that we were talking about: How do we bring people back into their bodies, into their biology? I think that was also a very big allure for us in VR.

DL: We’re five founders, and one of the guys, I’ve been friends with him since first grade. Three of us met in a game jam in 2010, and then the fifth one we just found him as we opened the studio. We started really just building our own thing in our spare time and little by little adding more to it.

We all took our jobs down to four days a week so that we could spend one day a week for years just working on our own projects and continuously taking our own time and extra effort to show the world that we can do more than what we’re doing in our other day jobs. And eventually when the opportunity came, we could show something and say, “This is what we can actually do.” You know? It’s not this that I’ve been working at Ubisoft, painting textures or whatever. I can actually do this. This is what I’ve been doing in my spare time, and it wouldn’t have happened without it I think.

DL: We finished Racket: Nx, which we loved. We’re very proud of it. If you would have asked any of us before Racket: Nx if we would ever work on a sports game, we’d say, “Nah, that’s weird. That’s not us.” I think that after Racket: Nx, we really wanted to make a game that is more in the vein of indie games that we love and play on PC that has more lore and has more of a world around it with characters and not just clean mechanics like Racket: Nx has. We wanted a little bit of violence too because Racket: Nx is really fun, but we wanted to break stuff. And the initial idea came from the sort of frustration that we have for games where just the lack of physical impact and weight is really an immersion breaker for us.

The very initial idea for UNDERDOGS was: Let’s put the player in a giant metal mech and have that mech mediate between the player and the game world, where the player can feel they’re in the mech, but the physical interaction is not actually the player’s hands, but the mech hands. Maybe that way, with that small separation, we can get rid of that discrepancy of, “I just hit something—why can’t I feel it?” So that was the original idea here. It was actually an idea for circumventing a technical limitation of the medium. I’m very proud of it right now because the feeling of physical satisfaction in UNDERDOGS is the best that I’ve felt in VR. And I think it’s thanks to this small little separation between the player and the physical world in the game.

OP: Lots of prototyping.

DL: A big part of VR for us is the physicality, and we really wanted to capitalize on it as much as possible. And you’ll see that UNDERDOGS also barely uses any of the buttons on the controller. We don’t want buttons. We want you to do stuff.

We’ve always kind of disliked, especially for this type of game, stick locomotion, like smooth locomotion or just joystick. And we tried out a bunch of different things. We had a few prototypes that we were actually pretty happy with. But ultimately, the thing that really nailed everything together was the game’s core fantasy: You are now a giant metal gorilla. That’s basically the fantasy, right? And you have these huge arms, and you’re just rampaging.

We were in the kitchen one morning, just talking with each other, and the idea came up. Conceptually, it immediately clicked—for most of us, at least. We had a working prototype that we were happy with really quickly. At least you and I were happy with it—it took us a while to convince everyone else maybe. We really fell in love with it. You’re a gorilla, you move like a gorilla, you punch like a gorilla, you behave like a gorilla, right? And it really is aligned with our basic principle that VR is for moving.

OP: Before I joined the studio, I came to visit and you had a prototype where you had to lean forward and backwards to locomote. And at the time, I was actually researching on my own the idea of using the space that you define as your play space. In general what the studio is trying to do is try and understand how to get rid of old habits that we have, whether it’s like UI or it’s locomotion or whatever it is—traditionally, we accept some set of solutions that maybe came from PC or maybe came from mobile and try to innovate on this. In this case, it’s a gorilla. But I think the philosophy behind the gorilla is not only the physicality of the gorilla, but the fact that this is very intuitive. It’s an intuitive thing to do. I understand immediately what to do.

DL: And just to prove that point, like a year and a half after we came up with this locomotion scheme, Gorilla Tag came out, which uses kind of a similar scheme, and everyone loves it. That’s like the base of the game. So ultimately, we have also real-world proof of this viability.

OP: I would say we don’t know our target audience exactly, because on one hand you have VR and on the other hand you have PC. And we're kind of both in our game. We were actually very curious to see how people would respond to this new thing that is both a very immersive game that you are embodied in something, but it’s also—

DL: Mechanically it is a completely 100% VR game, but it presents itself very much like a PC game. The style, the attitude, the visuals, they’re very PC gamer-ish.

OP: I would say it made us feel very validated that there is a market to go to, someone that is craving these types of games.

DL: That we’re not the only ones.

OP: That we are not the only ones. Because we’re making a game that I just played for like, I don’t know, four hours. I sweated a lot, and I had fun. We’re making a game that we enjoy playing.

DL: And not just that, we’re also making a game that we feel is sitting on a rubric that is really missing in VR right now that we would like to see more of. We’re not making this game just so we have this game in VR. We’re also hoping to prove that it’s viable in terms of the target audience in VR so that other people can make these types of games for VR for us to play as well.

OP: Marketing-wise, I would say that we had some sigh of relief, but I think we still have to prove to ourselves and to our audience that this is working.

DL: I think we can say that we got proof that what we want to make with UNDERDOGS is something that people want. The next proof that we have to get is that what we made is what we promised. And that’s what we’ll find out after the launch.

DL: To me, the funniest thing was always like my ex who used to play it, the prototype, in the early days, and she’d just come up and she’d just say, “I want to be a gorilla.” And she would start making gorilla noises while she was playing. She was lost in it. It wasn’t like doing a show, and this was a super early prototype.

OP: We have a community of internal playtesters within our Discord server, and we get all sorts of very funny comments. People will say, “Oh, wow, thank you for changing this part of the game” when we didn’t actually do anything. It’s a game that keeps changing—every time, you get something different.

I’m very shocked to see how the game is perceived from two different people who play the same game and perceive completely different things. And I think it’s very apparent in people’s playstyle. One friend of mine played the game, and she was focusing on bashing—like, just hitting with the body. She enjoyed the game so much, and she didn’t punch once. It’s fascinating to see that people play the game and they see two different games at the same time.

DL: You’re reminding me of another anecdote, which is actually feedback that we got from you Meta from one of our milestones. We’d just added what would be our reputation system. You’re going in this really criminally inclined gangster world. That’s the world of UNDERDOGS—it’s kind of a cyberpunk gangster vibe, and you have all these different people that you’re dealing with, and you can get more or less reputation with each of them, and we started making a system for that in the game. And initially in this specific build that we sent over, there was nothing but the visuals for it. Like, you just knew that you got more rep, but it didn’t actually mean anything mechanically. And some people from Meta were just, like, “Oh, I love this reputation thing so much. It’s so cool how it affects the game.” Seeing how people sometimes read into stuff more than is there and, on the other side, sometimes don’t understand things that are there that we want them to understand is always really fun.

DL: There are a lot. I think that it starts with just, like, how do you do UI in VR? When we were working on Racket: Nx, no one knew anything. There were a lot of just super basic things. Like, you have a pop up. How far is it supposed to be from the player? Where are the buttons supposed to go? And does everything need to be on the same screen? How much positionality can the player be relied on for all these kinds of basic things? These are basically tools of the trade that we learned.

In terms of production, I would say, never early access again. It was really nice to build the game with the community—it’s actually irreplaceable in some ways—but it’s also a huge hindrance on the production. And with Racket: Nx, it made a lot of sense. But I think that in general, unless you don’t have a very clear vision of what you want to make and have high confidence in it, it really makes things very complicated. Having a live version of the game out all the time that needs to be working and fun and playable is very, very costly.

What you think the players get and what the players actually get is never the same. And even the things that you think are most clearly communicated, you have to validate it.

OP: I want to also thank the Racket: Nx community for participating in our servers and playtesting the game with us. We have a very active community there that is really helping us for the next game, which is invaluable.

DL: It’s also nice that wherever we have UNDERDOGS mentioned outside of ourselves, whoever it is is usually like a VR veteran, and they’ll always mention Racket: Nx very positively, and that’s always a nice little pat on the shoulder and just makes us smile.

DL: We had a very slow prototyping phase and an insanely fast production phase. We were probably prototyping for like four years. Maybe two of those years, we were prototyping other things. But there were about three, four years between the first inception until the prototype we settled on before production started.

It was a very long process. We had a lot of commission work we needed to do during this time to keep the studio afloat. We prototyped the wrong things, focusing too much on too small a detail, things of that nature. And we actually left the original premise of the game for about a year and a half until we finally circled back to it and tried it again. The second time we started prototyping, it just clicked immediately.

And then eventually, we started production—actually, two years ago, like two years almost on the clock, January 2022. We had less than half of the team on board by that time. We had to build our team while we were doing the game, and we had basically just a nice fancy deck and a working proof of concept. For this kind of game—this production quality, building the team while we’re doing it—two years is a very, very short amount of time. So I think we took a long time to put all our ducks in a row, and then we just shot out.

OP: Something that I really value is the mechanical proof of concept that we made three years ago. Our QA guy, who also happened to do some game design for us—we’re all doing everything—one of the things that I told him when he joined the company was, “Play the prototype.” It’s really nice that we have some guiding style.

DL: Yeah, there were a few basic things in the proof of concept that worked so well that we always return to them for reference. Are we hitting the marks that we set for ourselves in the proof of concept?

OP: Yes. What’s amazing, you basically punch big cardboard enemies that look like dogs or sheep. You’re not sure what you do with them, but the feeling is there and it’s very humbling to work on a game for maybe a year or a year and a half and then play this proof of concept and say, “My game is not good enough. This piece of early work is much better.”

DL: Yeah, same with the game vibe, by the way. We did do a fancy deck and one of the points there was to say, “Alright, for the deck, this is the game’s vibe. This is its attitude. This is its personality in rock.” And whenever I’m traveling out in the mental space to find new things for the game, I return and compare it to this rock so that I can see if I’m hitting the mark.

OP: We actually had this before the alpha, two weeks before we released the alpha. I don’t remember who, but someone said, “Listen, guys. Please play the prototype.”

DL: It was me.

OP: And we all played the prototype, and we all came back and said, “OK, yeah, it’s not good enough.”

DL: We had a very long time of planning and prototyping that resulted in a very clear vision, both in terms of style and personality and in terms of the basic moment-to-moment feel of the game. And then we just had a blitz of execution for the past two years. We’ve just been working nonstop. We’ve been sacrificing basically everything in our lives to get this done in time, and the only reason that we can make something coherent in these two years is that we planned everything and prototyped it so well ahead of time.

OP: Look I’m a gamer, that’s what I love. It’s one of my biggest hobbies. I want people to say, “OK. This is possible in VR in a way that I’m yet to be familiarized with until now.”

DL: To me, the whole world of UNDERDOGS came from a different world that we were working on for a long time. It developed into this world where the whole point for me was to explore the idea of safety vs. freedom. I think we’re living in a time where the kernel of some of the biggest cultural issues that we’re facing is freedom vs. safety, and I don’t know what the answer is. I think there’s merit to both sides of this debate.

New Brakka is kind of this bubble of absolute freedom and zero safety in a world that is basically controlled by safety-first AIs. That is kind of the world we’re in. And the game kind of explores this dog-eat-dog, human-controlled, no laws, anarcho-capitalism. That’s kind of the area that we explore there. To me, I think having a game where the world is tough and it’s hardcore and the corners aren’t cut and the people aren’t coddled and nothing is nerfed—I want to see more of that in our culture again. I think that we’re going a bit too much in the other direction. I want to see a bit more hardcoreness and a bit more toughness and a bit more of a spine in some of the games that I’m playing and watching and producing.

One of our core principles is: Get out of your comfort zone. Take big risks or die in your comfort zone. And we’ve been trying to get that across in the game a little bit in mechanical terms, and in terms of the lore and the narrative.

OP: In UNDERDOGS, when you die, you’re still part of the city. You start again. The city keeps running around you and you just need to find a way to climb the ladder and it takes what it takes.

DL: And no one’s there to help you. It’s all on you. It’s tough. There are no shortcuts.

We actually started out with a game that was too hardcore, and we had to dial it down a bit to make it less punishing and more fun, but that’s the origin of the game. It’s like, “Guys, I don’t know if you noticed, but things are going down. It’s time for us to get a little tougher because we’re going to need it—because this is what the times are calling for, and let’s do that together. Here’s a bit of culture that might remind us a little bit of what it’s like to have to face difficult things maybe.” I don’t think we took that to any extreme. Obviously, we still need a game that is fun to play and inviting, and we don’t really want to clobber anyone over the head or anything like that.

OP: Yeah, and when you find yourself stealing from someone, even though you’re really like, “My instinct is never to steal from an NPC,” and then I end up stealing. It’s interesting.

DL: Vacation.

OP: The crunch is real.

DL: The crunch is real, and it’s been lasting for two years. We still have a lot of stuff we want to do for UNDERDOGS. As we worked on the project, we had to rescope it again and again, and descope it again and again and again and take all these systems and extra stuff that we wanted in the game and leave it for after launch. We have a lot of content that we want to keep updating the game with, and we already have plans for our first update, our second update, our third update, so just like we did with Racket: Nx, we’re going to be keeping this game alive and growing and fine tuning it for a long time.

OP: I also want to see what people will do with this game. It’s a very mechanical game. It’s physics-based. I want to see people break it. I want to see people tear it apart. I want to see what people want next in this game, and I think we’ll be changing our plans a lot.

DL: Yeah, old plans change on first contact with the enemy. And other than that, we all constantly have ideas bubble up, technologies that we’re interested in, mechanical ideas that we’re interested in. VR is developing around us and having more MR stuff in there that might be relevant. And at the same time, the studio has this very rich world that we’ve been building since 2010 that is remotely connected to the world of UNDERDOGS but very, very different, and at least myself and the other founders are dying to make a game in that world. We had two prototypes in that world that were not for VR, and it’s a world. It’s kind of a post-utopia world, a utopia that fell apart and what’s left after it. Tthere’s so much to explore there, and even though we came up with a lot of it before VR was a thing, a lot of the premise actually just fits like a glove into VR mechanics, so that’s something that we’ll definitely be the consolidating and starting to work on probably after we calm down a little but from UNDERDOGS.

You can see in our progress, like, we have Racket: Nx, now, we have UNDERDOGS. We don’t like staying in the same place for too long, and we like jumping ahead every time. I think that with the next project, we’ll be looking for new frontiers as well.

OP: I would give a personal take on the studio. I found my place in the studio, thanks to these guys. And since then, new people came in, and my lesson from my experience in making my first game is that we need to let every voice count and this is very hard when you work in this industry.

There’s a lot of talk about how the industry works right now. I think culture is one key aspect to make the game, and I hope we're making a good game—I hope we’re having a good culture. And I think this is a discussion which we shouldn’t avoid as an industry, and we should understand that we might not be playing the same game as other industries and things like scale might not work the same way for games as they work for high-tech companies.

DL: I have no idea what’s going to happen with this game. Personally, I gave up everything else in my life for the past two years to make this happen. And I have no idea how it’s going to be received—none at all. Of course I want it to be well received, not just because I want it to pave our way for the next game but also just sharing something with someone else on an artistic level. Basically you’re coming to someone and saying, “Hey, look. Isn’t this cool?” And if you don’t get feedback that it’s good, you feel bad. But if people would come to you and say, “Yeah, that is so cool, then you’re like, “Oh, I connected with someone on something.” So obviously I really care about how the game will be received. But at the same time, I feel like even if the game just disappeared, if all of our repositories disappeared tomorrow with no recovery and UNDERDOGS was dead like that, I would have zero regrets about any of it. I feel like I’ve just been nothing but blessed to be able to work with the people on my team, to be able to work on a project where I could literally pull no punches. It’s a really rare opportunity, and I’m just incredibly thankful for the experience, even regardless of what comes later. That’s like the main thing I want to say about this whole thing.