As the meme goes, the real treasure is the friends you made along the way. Even more so if you are planning to go mining for gold and valuable gems, as you have more hands and backpacks to take the loot out.
For the second anniversary of Cave Digger 2: Dig Harder, our latest VR game, we wanted to bring the mines to everyone. Thus, we started working on a version of Cave Digger 2 for flat screens and consoles.
For those of you who haven’t heard of Cave Digger 2 before, welcome to an action-adventure game where you can explore the old mines, natural formations, and ancient ruins in wildland valleys .
What do you do there? You start as a prospector with only a pickaxe. You dig for loot and trade the mined valuables for new gadgets, areas, funky fashion, and more. All while you try not to die by the hands of the local fauna.
Compared to the first game of the series, we wanted to have players join forces with friends or other members of the community and adventure together. And so we did, and added co-op multiplayer to Cave Digger 2: Dig Harder.
However, quite often VR players have friends who don’t own any headset or don’t like playing in virtual reality, even if a game seems interesting. So, we decided to build a bridge between the two worlds with Cave Digger 2.
The goal was ambitious: multiplayer co-op and crossplaying from all consoles and all systems, in VR or non-VR. Our team had an interesting challenge ahead. Not only did we have to implement each platform’s own multiplayer requirements, but we had to make sure that everything was working between the three VR versions and between the four flat versions. That took a lot of resources, from both our coding and testing teams.
It was tough, but since you are reading this article right now, it worked! Now go take a pickaxe with you, grab some dynamite, ping your friends, and head into the caves to unearth the secrets they keep!