we've been a bit quiet lately, but the reason for this is that we are working on a brand new VR game! We have to admit, Rainbow Reactor was off to a slow start, but we constantly improved the game and learned a lot, and now the game spent quite some time in Steam's top 10% of VR-Only Titles and it's got a bunch of really nice mentions, like being featured in BenPlaysVR's Steam sale picks, or VoodooDE's "the best VR games" video.
So we took quite the leap of faith and funded a "real" company - the Tunermaxx GmbH - in order to be able to work on new titles in a professional setting. And the really big deal about all of this is that we were able to get the attention of a major player in the VR business - so keep your eyes peeled for our big reveal, which will be coming to our brand new Discord server first. If you like, head over to https://t.co/tmLudX2hQQ?amp=1 and be our guest. Once we have a bunch of people there, we will also start doing some giveaways to hype everyone up for the new, secret game :D
And for those of you that are worried that this will be the end of improvements for Rainbow Reactor … well, we are still a quite small team, so we have to concentrate on the new game. At the same time, we are learning a lot of things, and we are planning to update Rainbow Reactor with some of the nice QOL-improvements we are creating for new game. So keep your eyes peeled for more Dottie, be it here or on Discord :D
All the best,
The Rainbow Reactor Team
Halloween is Here, and Print's Not Dead!
Hello Everyone,
The spooky season is upon us once more, and this year it's even scarier than usual! An invisble, remorseless killer is on the prowl outside so it's probably better to stay indoors and just play VR!
We're celebrating October 31st with a special surprise which can only be experienced on that day, so be sure to start up Rainbow Reactor, if you have it in your library. And if not, now would be a really good time to add it to your bag of treats, as it's currently 67% discounted! Yeah, Steam somehow didn't allow us to make a discount of 66,6% - no idea why they are so boring in that regard ;D
Another nice piece of news is that the VR world finally got its very own printed magazine - fittingly titled the VR TREND MAGAZINE. And guess who's in it - Rainbow Reactor! I think it's safe to say that these fantastic people deserve all our attention and some candy, too - so if you like, go to vrtrendmagazine.com and have a look =)
Stay safe everyone and have a scary Halloween,
The Rainbow Reactor Team
Breaking Even – Time To Celebrate :D
Hello Everyone,
we've been nagging long enough how hard it is as first-time VR developer to make any money - so of course we'd like to share good news with you too, as soon as they happen. So now, after selling Rainbow Reactor on Steam for 20 months, we can finally reveal that we broke even on our production cost of around 5000€ !
This is not a huge sum of money by any game's standard, and to be honest, Rainbow Reactor would've cost over 10 times more if it were a fully paid project. But we are happily working on the game in our spare time, so we're only counting what we had to actually spend in hard-won cash to get some things on board we couldn't have done ourselves.
And right after launching the game, it didn't look like we'd ever see that money again, to be honest. There are just too many VR games out there on Steam to get noticed, in total there are about 4000 now, out of which 90% do worse than us. So we are really proud that we managed to earn the trust of you, our audience :D
By steadily improving the game and adding new featues we managed to keep it interesting and relevant, even though we had no idea about marketing or distribution when we started out. That has hugely improved, and even though the money we make by selling games seems infinitely far away from creating a sustainable income, we decided to go all-in and found a "real" game company because we love VR so much! Soooo please welcome (* slow clap *) Tunermaxx Media GmbH into the realm of German Game Development Companies!
To celebrate this occasion and give you a chance to send a little tip of $1 our way if you like our work, we decided to heavily discount the game's original soundtrack. It has been available for some time and has also recently been upgraded – if you want to know, it now adds about 5% to the game's revenue for us.
So if you like, pick it up fpr just $1, or if you already have it, why don't you leave a review and tell your friends that the bundle of Game + OST is now decidedly cheaper than the game alone ;D
And while we'll still keep working on Rainbow Reactor, there are new exciting adventures ahead … so keep your eyes glued to this spot if you want to know more ^_^
All the best, The Rainbow Reactor Team
A Small Service Update
Hello Everyone,
We released Rainbow Reactor Version 91 today. This is mainly a stability update which improves the game's startup, especially for people who have problems with their internet connection or a PC which is not the strongest for VR apps.
In some cases, starting the game for the first time could take up to 60 seconds now – subsequent startups should be much faster & more stable though.
If you are in the mood to send a tip our way, you could snatch up the game's newly improved OST, write a Steam review about our update policy or recommend the game to your friends ;-)
Have a nice weekend and for those in the US, a great 4th of July :D
All the best, The Rainbow Reactor Team
Community Update To Game & OST :D
Hello Everyone,
The Steam Summer Sale is here and for us, this is a great opportunity to celebrate with the fantastic VR community! It's no secret that while Rainbow Reactor does well and ranks in the top 5-10% of VR-only games in Steam, this is not an area where you make money, due to the small user base. From our experience, only the top 1% can make back their investment with VR at the moment, but for us, this doesn't matter too much, as we have great fun with all of you guys! So our take is to be patient, make the game grow and make a lot of noise for VR while doing so, so the community will become bigger, ultimately enabling more and more indie devs to create financially sustainable VR games :D
One big source of motivation this year was the German Remix Competition held by the popular local blog VR-Legion.de - there were lots of great entries and prizes. To share the fun we had with everyone, we now inlcuded the winning title "Game Over" by D.u.B. TV featuring GamingLady Nici into our Original Soundtrack. This music collection has also been enhanced with another title, the music from the trailer, which is the "Theme from Wonderful World 3D" by Swedish composer Andreas Ahlm. Currently, the OST is on sale at a 60% discount, so if you want to pass a little tip in our direction, feel free to buy it ;D As an additional incentive, we have now added uncompressed WAV files of every title to the OST.
The game itself is currently 70% discounted, but the biggest saving is in the combo bundle of game + OST, which has its biggest discount yet. If you have some friends who could be interested in Rainbow Reactor, you would do us a great favor by letting them know. Another thing that helps small devs immensely, is writing Steam reviews. For us, this is now more true than ever, as we are very close to the threshhold where we are allowed to introduce Trading Cards to the game! We have already set everything up and are only waiting for the Steam algorithm to confirm that we have enough positive reviews. So that is another thing to look forward to. :-)
For now, we also added more unlockables to the game - the "museum tour" now features several TV sets showing background information about the game. The inventor of Chroma Fusion, Alfred Luzian von Hoffenhasselbrock, will explain to you the origins of the Rainbow Reactor. And going back to the community, we received even more "Fan Music" outside of the official Remix competition in the form of user Wuzzel's "Imaginary End Credit Theme For Rainbow Reactor". Well, it's not imaginary anymore! We have included another TV that can be accessed after beating the game, playing this great piece of music and showing the credits for the game.
We hope you all have a great summer, a lot of fun playing, and that you can snatch up a couple VR titles in the sale, and maybe even write reviews for them. This means a lot to small developers and we can tell you first hand, it will definitely help improve and grow the world of VR, which ultimately is great for all of us :D
All the best from the Rainbow Reactor team :-)
Party Time!
Hallo Everyone,
it seems the situation with the coronavirus is slowly getting better and a lot of countries and states are relaxing their lockdown measures, especially over here in Europe. It can't hurt to be extra careful, but even if you're still hunkering down at home with your family, you can still have your own little party with two or three people!
For those occasions, we listened to our player Shapeshifta who asked for more streamlined sessions in Party Mode. We originally thought of this to be a mode for big events where every single contestant's name is entered by hand on a physical keyboard - but for a smaller group of players, this can be done much better!
So now you can enter a list of player names using a software keyboard - you'll see it floating to the right of Dottie once you enter name entry mode. Put in the names of everyone who wants to play and then, the name of the next player will be shown after each round, so you can pass the HMD and keep going without further delay. Should the player forfeit their turn for a bathroom break or whatever, it's no problem - just press "Next Player" instead.
The list of player names will be saved, so you can re-use it the next time, or you can clear it manually, if you want to start over or take data safety very seriously in your own home ;-)
For everyone who hates parties, we've still improved the game with this new build #89 - we have completely revamped the throwing physics, so the balls should fly better than ever before! Time to attack those high scores again, as we recently had a new champion take the #1 slot on the main leaderboard with an astonishing 167K points! Congratulations, Chickenbutt! Yes, that is this player's name. Don't like it? Put your own name at the top :D
All the best from The Rainbow Reactor Team
ps: one more word on the corona crisis … it seems there is more gaming being done lately, but talking to other indies, we found that people still mostly buy "big" games, which is perfectly understandable. Still, our entire gross in the month of may was just $38 … that is really not good, as you can imagine. Since we also got a Sale going at the moment, please tell your friends if you like Rainbow Reactor, and if you want to support us with a couple of $, you could always buy our Original Sound Track - thaaaaanks :D
Update #76 for more Stay-At-Home-Fun
Hello Everyone,
times are a bit crazy with Coronavirus running rampant in many countries so many of us have to stay at home. For us as a small indie team from Finland and Germany, not much has changed on our game development, as we collaborate using the internet anyway. Still, it's kind of bad for us that we lost a bunch of paid jobs to the situation, but things could be much worse. At least now we have time to get to work on some deeper layers of the game – a lot of work has been done "under the hood" so the latest dowload is 789 MB, which is almost the size of the entire game.
A lot of this stuff is meant for future features and collaborations we're currently working on with some 3rd parties and we may not speak about those yet. Still, you can see a lot has changed as the game is much more physics-based now. VR games evolve in a breathtaking manner and after playing stuff like Boneworks or Half-Life: Alyx, it's clear that we needed some updated physics. You will notice that your hands collide with the reactor railings for example, and also the chroma balls of course - so you can stop them in their tracks just by holding your hand in the way, or if you feel adventurous, you could do volleyball-like serves and pitch those balls into the pool. We wouldn't advise it though, as the chroma balls are a bit too heavy for that ;-)
The biggest changes are meant to give you more rewards for playing while self-isolating. For the first time, all of the game's work shifts which you have not previously completed will be locked. By beating shifts, no matter in which game mode, the next higher one will be unlocked, along with its teleport points. Newly unlocked Museum Tour Stations are now indicated by a fancy, flashing beacon. And from tour point #6 onwards, you also unlock pedestals with new looks for Dottie, which swap out the actual in-game model. In addition to the colors that existed before, there are now to new ones to be discovered!
Also we added some new sounds to the game – the game's menu now has interface sound and if you press the button to make Dottie skip her line, she has new reaction sounds.
So check out these new features and if you like, tell your friends about the Steam Sale taking place at the moment where the game is 75% off :D
But most important of all – Stay Safe Everyone!
All the best from The Rainbow Reactor Team
ps: if you experience any control issues, please make sure in the Steam VR overlay menu that you have the "official controller bindings from developers" activated by clicking on that little gear in the lower right corner of the SteamVR menu and then going to "Controller Bindings"
Update 75 is now live, with another community request :D
Hello Everone,
it's that time of year again … or rather, that time in every fourth year – February the 29th! So first of all, Happy Birthday to all among you who were born on this day some years ago – we hope had an incredibly cool day today, with your rare Birthday even falling on a Saturday :D
Time for all of us to celebrate too, so we just put Update #75 live. This one (and the unreleased #74) feature some regular bug fixes and improvements under the hood, but the most noticable feature is a thing that was requested by our longtime fan, Youtuber Hoshi82 - also known as "The Angry German VR Game Nerd" - and it is to stop Dottie from claptrapping all day! At the push of a button, you can now make her skip the current line, no matter what it is. So wether you want to speed up the countup at the end of the level, or you're just tired of being told that you just created another residue reaction … just press the button and enjoy the silence!
Of course we chose an appropriate button for all controller types, but if you like, you can also easily re-define the button in SteamVR's controller settings, as we made it an extra function called "Skipping".
In case you have grown completely tired of Dotties lamenting, don't forget you can turn her volume to zero in the Set Up Menu. If you do that, the count-up at the end of a level will be massively sped up, so that might be just the thing for intense score hunts :-)
Also, since we arrived at Update Number 75 now, we thought it would be cool to also grant a discount of 75% to go along with the game, as well as the special occasion of Ferbruary 29th. So if you want to tell friends about this game or even know a birthday girl or boy that celebrates in the next couple of days, you could give the game as a gift! Aren't we selfless in our thinking ;-)
Alright everyone, keep on Chromaballin' and see you soon!
Now With LIV Support
Today, we released Update #73 for Rainbow Reactor. There are some fixes and stability improvements, but the major difference to the game's code is one that you cannot see at first glance: We have now included a LIV interface, so content creators and video enthusiasts can now make mixed reality videos featuring Rainbow Reactor!
For more information on this software, head over to the homepage https://liv.tv/ It can be used to create really cool mixed reality videos, where the player appears to really be "inside" the virtual reality environment. Awesome stuff, we're looking forward to the first results from the great VR community. Speaking of which, German youtuber Hoshi82 was so kind to model for us so we could create this incredible news preview thumbnail:
In other Rainbow Reactor related news, the German VR webpage www.vr-legion.de is currently hosting a remix competition where musicians can download the new German voice sample pack from Gaming Lady Nici, who is the new German voice of our flying robot Dottie, and create a song featuring those audio snippets. There already are a bunch of very creative entries, so we're excited to hear what else people will come up with until the competition ends on February 29th, 2020. Then, winners for various prizes which include a visit to the "MRTV Experience" in the city of Dortmund (excluding travel and accomodation, but including a Döner Kebab) as well as some copies of the newly released Original Soundtrack of Rainbow Reactor, which can be purchased on Steam by the way – See our last blog post for details.
That's all for today, have fun in virtual (and mixed) reality!
Update 69, Unlockables and OST out now!
Tirelessly, we keep improving Rainbow Reactor and our Update #69 just went live. Once again we made some visual changes, improved game controls and added unlockables. But the real news is that if you have too much money and not enough Synthwave, we may be able to help you ;-)
But let's talk about the unlockables first. For the first time ever, you'll be able to change the look of our flying HoverBot Dottie through the (relatively) new Museum Tour. We've added some exhibits on pedestals, and once you've beaten the 5th Work Shift of the game, you can touch the model of a SOY9000 HoverBot in the Blue-And-Orange styling of a Riegfried800 to change the look of your robotic supervisor. if I say "Bub" and "Bob" now and you still don't know what I'm talking about, nevermind! Just try it in-game :D
In any case, the real luxurious eye-candy is reserved to those upper 1% (literally, when I look at our achievement stats) who beat the 9th shift – You will gain the luxury of having a golden HoverBot at your disposal!
However, this is not the only makeover our host is able to get. German players may have been annoyed to no end by the synthesized ramblings of Dietrich, who was voiced by yours truly. Finally, German players get a change to listen to a more Dottie-like voice which can now be chosen in the Setup menu, and it belongs to none other than the famous female German youtuber, GamingLady Nici. To level the playing field and give international audience a choice too, you can now choose voice variant EN2 to be chided by an English version of Dietrich, again voiced by Schwarnold Artztenegger, erm, no – by yours truly.
Next up, we went through the trouble of implementing yet another SteamVR update which should fix some inconveniences, especially for Valve Index Controller users, who should finally be able to grab balls with the grip button out of the box. But that's not all! As a little gimmick, you can now squeeze the balls even harder, to make them glow with more energy. This has no effect on gameplay, it's just there to make the most of the hardware and increase the immersion a little bit. Oculus Touch users can also try it by additionnaly squeezing the trigger once they are holding a ball using the grip button. If you have made Controller Bindings of your own, you may have to go to the Steam Settings menu and select our default controller binding for Rainbow Reactor to make it work. If you're having trouble with this, have a look here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/789090/discussions/0/1742265551915470034/
Again, please note that the "camera reset" to the best playing position is now executed by pressing a button on each controller simultaneously to avoid the chance of doing it accidentally in-game – i.e., it's assigned to clicking both joysticks on the Valve Index / Oculus Touch controllers.
Last but not least, we finally released the Original Soundtrack for Rainbow Reactor for purchase. If you have always wanted to listen to those 9 catchy synthwave tunes outside of the game, or you are plagued by a bad conscience because you picked the game up in a sale for a very low price, you can now support us by buying the thing – potentially enabling us to finally start working on a new game. I know, nobody likes whining, and I can perfectly understand that many of you only buy games when a Steam Sale is on – I'm absolutely the same. But switching sides and becoming a developer taught me that for a small indie team, this can really be hard. After one year of Rainbow Reactor being sold on Steam, we still have not made our initial investment back and really, 99% of the ~1000 games we sold so far were sold in Sales at discounts of an average of 60%. Had we sold every game at the full asking price, we'd long be in the clear and would've started work on our second game. This is not supposed to make everyone feel bad, but have a heart for our fellow indie VR devs and try to just buy MORE games in Sales the next time ;D
And for those who did indeed gave us that huge vote of confidence and appreciation by buying the game at full price, let us thank you by sending you the freshly released Original Soundtrack FREE OF CHARGE! Just send me an email with your receipt mail from Steam (you can make a screenshot and redact any unnecessary personal information) - the adress is kalle (at) tunermaxx (dot) com - and I will personally send you a code for the OST.
Wow, so that was another huge wall of text - honestly, we are happy that we've made it so far, we're one year on the market now and still improving the game … but what's more important is that the game is still played, and we owe that to YOU! So thanks again, keep those balls rolling and if you like, write us a review or tell-a-friend on the social media of your choosing! We are eternally grateful for your support :D
