‘VAIL VR’ Launches on the Official Meta Quest Store

It’s been just shy of a month since we announced that popular multiplayer shooter VAIL VR was making the leap from App Lab to the Meta Quest Store. And now, the day that the community has been waiting for has arrived: VAIL VR is now available on the Quest Store proper for $29.99 USD.

We sat down with several members of the team at indie developer AEXLAB, including co-founders and brothers Albert and Jonathan Ovadia, to learn more.

Panda (aka Chandler):VAIL VR is a multiplayer shooter that provides the most realistic tactile gunplay that just feels good in your hands. Every day, we pursue an unparalleled combat experience where you feel like you’re actually holding the weapon and using it.

Albert Ovadia: It began as an art-driven game, and that was the original concept. It was going to interface and plug into a music album that I was working on then, and then it evolved naturally because these projects—lots of projects and apps or bands or games—they tend to want to be bigger and find a larger audience, right? It’s just natural. So in the mission of the project finding its audience, it took on a life of its own. When it finally began to walk, I realized that we needed to have multiplayer. That was kind of the moment where it clicked.

It must have been New Year’s Day, maybe 2016. I was talking to another friend who’s a VR developer who had actually gotten me into VR. His name is Julian Reyes. He’s actually a very good and intimate friend and also a very well-known VR developer with a bunch of accolades, and he does really amazing projects for NASA now and other things. But I was with him on New Year’s Day here in Miami, and I told him what I wanted to do and he said, “That sounds really crazy. You’re going to need like 30 people, and I don’t think it’s feasible.” And he had just done a 30-person project that was supposed to take four months and took like three years.

AO: So he says, “Don’t even get into this, it’s a horrible idea.” But I had to do it. I really don’t know what anyone else who’s here would do if it weren’t for this game to be honest. I can’t imagine another world. There was some apprehension early on because software is very complex, games are complex, and we’re also original IP. VAIL is never confused for another title, and there was a lot of artistic drive from everybody on the team. We really wanted to find our own voice, do our own thing.

A lot of us on the team are kind of isolationists in that we work on the game and we find its evolution through a lot of iteration and what feels correct or good to us—we’re not really that focused on what other people are doing or what the trends are. Sometimes people talk to me about other games or other things that are going on, and I know so little or nothing that I feel out of touch. But I know that if we just keep iterating and working really hard to make VAIL a little bit better every day and try to impress ourselves, I figure that’s the winning strategy.

And then last thing I’ll add is just that the evolution has been reflective of the community because we did something sort of wild. Jonathan, when did we first introduce people to the game?

Jonathan Ovadia: Probably the summer before COVID, like summer 2019, we did pre-alpha. I was playing a lot of competitive VR, esport teams and leagues. I was in these communities for a couple years and eventually asked, “Hey, you guys want to try a game that my brother is working on?” I surprised everybody, and we held a pre-alpha tournament.

We ended up doing so many esport events throughout development, which is kind of psychotic. But it really helped bolster the game because every time there’s a deadline for something, it’s like you have to do homework. They give you a month to do an essay, and then the last day before it’s due, you end up crushing that essay. Having these milestones before launch was extremely helpful and very stressful at the same time, but it was really good.

We also raised a couple of million dollars through crowdfunding with the early community members. We’ve been super open, screen sharing our programming, just super open on development the entire way. We’d always survey and ask for feedback after every playtest session. Our plan was to make the best game we could, and then when you let in 1,000, 2,000, 10,000, now 50,000+ people, it’s a community.

AO: Yeah, it sparks a lot of really good design discussions, and honestly there have probably been at least a dozen key ideas that came from the community that really have shaped the game. The game is highly reflective of the people who play it.

JO: You know, Albert and I, we’re brothers, but we think very differently. Albert wants to work on what he wants to work on, and he doesn’t look at anything else. I, on the other hand, because I’m not a programmer, play video games four or five hours a day and get influenced by all the video games that I play. So we said, “Hey, let’s get this into the hands of people who play games all day long as soon as possible and be as public as possible.”

We’ll try different things, and the community is the judge. It’s a very simple thing: If it goes to the community, whatever the majority says goes. It’s very democratic, and it works. We added jumping, for example, and had to take it out. We’ve added a lot of things that we apply it, we tweak it, we try, we give it a certain deadline. If it works and people love it, great. If they don’t, we take it out.

AO: The community has grown a lot, and we have a lot of in-game skins and cosmetics and a lot of human expression—a lot of human story in the game now. A lot of people have met each other in the game. The majority of the players are highly social and more casual. We’ve been very lucky in that our community has been relatively free of toxicity or problems.

I’ve joined games quietly and just played—I’ll log on and test something or just play with other players. And people are so kind. You can see when someone’s new, opening the menu and trying to understand how things work. Someone else will walk up to them, even if they’re an enemy, and be like, “Oh hey, are you new? I can show you how to do that.” People are just nice. It’s kind of a beautiful thing when it happens, and it feels like it happens a lot in our game.

JO: For about two years, we had two game modes. We had Artifact, our version of Search and Destroy, and Team Deathmatch. And we focused two years on polishing all the core mechanics on those two game modes. Since then, we’ve added over a dozen game modes, and they’re all fun, casual game modes. And the way we’ve designed our game is that at the end of every match, there’s a voting screen. It lets the people in the lobby decide if they want to go to Picnic and literally just hang out, draw on boards, play mini-games, or if they want to do something fun with modifiers, like low-gravity, snipers only. The way we’ve developed the core game loop, it lets each lobby dictate how the flow will go.

Panda: Yeah, I think everyone wants to win and they like to compete with each other, even if they’re not hardcore competitive. Everyone likes to win and compete in that sense. But even if you’re not the best player in the world, you’ll join and you’ll have a great time because there are so many fun things to do.

JO: The guns. The guns just feel really, really good and satisfying. Panda?

Panda: My favorite part of the game right now are the knives. I honestly think we have some of the best knives in any multiplayer game. They feel so good and realistic, the way they interact with people. There’s something about the way that the knives are designed—like the engineer did their magic—and that’s my favorite part right now.

AO: I am so happy you guys are really good at telling apart what is real life and what is fiction and simulation because, taken out of context, you both sound like you’d have your own Netflix special series.

JO: What’s your favorite part, Enzo? You build stuff all day.

Enzo Rodriguez: I want to say working on it as a programmer, but if I have to pick one thing, it’s probably the guns—just guns and optics because, you know, we have really good people working on that stuff.

JO: We can skip Acog, we know the answer. No, I’m kidding. Go ahead. What’s up, Bartosz?

Acog (aka Bartosz): Yeah, to me, the guns are the best part. Optics and guns, basically. We’ve got guns that feel realistic, but they’re not overly complicated. They’re very fun. And the optics are good.

JO: Chayan? Please give a different answer as the creative director here.

Chayan Bruni: I’m going to go for the skins at this point. They really give that sense of personifying what you believe in, who you are, and I really love that part of it.

JO: You’ve done a really good job with the cosmetics. Thank you, Chayan. And Albert, what’s your favorite part?

AO: Honestly—

JO: The music?

AO: Well, the music is quite good in the game. That’s true. We don’t talk about it enough, but we also have amazing sound and music. But, no, the thing that that moves me the most is when I’m in a server with other players and I see them all—people can mix and match their cosmetics because the head is one thing, the body is another thing, the gloves are separate, the guns also have skins, and people get really creative with how they express themselves through how they equip the cosmetics. Being in a lively server, which they’re all very lively, and there’s a lot of downtime in VAIL for some reason. There’s a lot of time spent where people are just talking, which is cool. VR is way more social than people think it is.

JO: Yeah, I like that about VR too. I think it’s really cool, just being able to see the expression and the movement of people—it’s just very different. Like when I played Call of Duty, it’s not like that. It’s just voice chat.

AO: Right, yeah. It’s just a bunch of people on their couch, and they can’t see each other—they can’t enjoy each other’s mannerisms.

Acog: From my perspective as someone responsible for the tech art or visual side of the game, there were several issues. Of course, especially when developing for the standalone version, for the mobile chipset, the hardware is pretty different. We had to optimize each asset in the game to have a much lower triangle and vertices count.

Secondly, the draw calls, like where we had merged assets and limited the number of materials or shaders as we call them associated with them. We had to focus on getting the shader complexity as low as possible to not overload the GPU and necessarily had to fake almost everything—fake reflections, fake specular highlights.

AO: Yeah, it’s crazy because you want the game to look the best it can look, you need it to run steady and stable, and then you also want to prevent all these little hitches and hiccups.

ER: Yeah, so all the technical art and stuff aside as Acog said, we’ve had to fake quite a bit of things and on the programming side, it’s really been about building systems and optimizing for things that we didn’t really think about before. Some things are very cheap on a computer. You know, you have a lot more power, you have a dedicated giant GPU and things like that. So it was a lot of building systems and optimizing for things that you couldn’t foresee unless you knew you were building for Android on a mobile chipset, limiting things that you wouldn’t otherwise limit on PC, and just having both things make sense because we’re a cross-platform game. So we want things to make sense while also being able to run properly and within the budget that we have for this platform.

AO: We really just want players to experience the combined goodness of all these things we’ve built. We get so excited about the tech sometimes because we’ve built a lot of esoteric or truly novel things for VAIL. But on their own, it’s just a slice of tech. Like, it’s cool, it’s really great, but how do you go from, “Oh, that’s an insane tech demo” to, “This is a game people actually want to play and spend thousands of hours in.” I think that’s the thing that’s most difficult, and that’s something that has been really beautiful about working with a team is that not only are people highly competent and technically capable, they’re really awesome at communicating and working together because that’s where the real magic happens. I think the magic is really in the gel and glue that goes between everything and brings it together.

Panda: I feel like VAIL could work really well as a flatscreen game, but it just also wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun or anywhere near the same experience. What makes a shooter in VR so much more fun is the fact that you’re aiming with your own two hands.

Panda: And we, as developers, have gone out multiple times to the range to shoot real guns. Some people live in countries where they don’t even have access to guns, so we fly them to the United States and they get that chance to come and have a fun experience. Someone who’s never shot a gun in their life has better aim than everyone on the team, just because of how much they’ve shot in VR, and that’s something that really makes a difference. When I go to play flatscreen shooters now, it frustrates me because I feel a disconnect.

JO: I’d say for me, 80%, 90% of my time has just been in first-person shooters, and after playing 20 years of first-person shooters, the only natural evolution is to put me in the game. Graphics already got really good. I don’t get stimulated anymore by flatscreen shooters. I can play flatscreen story-mode games,, which is also cool in VR, obviously better. We just need more content. But for shooters, being in it and throwing a grenade or throwing a knife, it just feels awesome.

JO: I just want people to know that we’re all gamers, and we really care, and we’re super open to just communicating with anybody who cares about what we care about. It’s funny, but every single person we’ve hired has come from the community. They’re all gamers. I’ve played a bunch of games with them. They’re on Discord. Sometimes I have to tell them to go to sleep because they’re responding at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning to people, but that’s also our secret sauce—that we actually care.

ER: I think we’ve all touched on it a bit, but it’s the overall sense of community. It’s a place where people can feel that they can be their truest self and really find their next best friend on the way. I feel that video games as a whole are one of the most immersive social platforms, especially when it comes to the medium of VR. The sense of expression, presence, and just natural interaction with others is far deeper than what you can get in flatscreen situations, and that’s really important to me because I think that’s what life is all about. It’s the relationships you make along the way, and it’s exciting to help build the future of that.