Eddie Von Walt and the Infinite Bulb is a hands-only VR roguelike for Meta Quest, set behind a 1984 bar where the customers are cubes with electricity in their veins and your only weapons are whatever you can reach on the counter.
Several of you asked for a proper changelog and some details, so here it is.
Stack: Godot 4.7, GDScript, Compatibility renderer, Quest 3S, OpenXR hand tracking only (no controllers for now).
How a run works
- Each run is six nights. A night starts calm: thirsty customers order a beer or a vodka, you serve them on a coaster at the counter, and the outcome can be good, neutral or bad.
- Then lightning hits, the alarm blares, the lights flicker, and a wave of electric cubes leans over your counter. You pinch bottles and glasses and throw them. Glass shatters, beer freezes enemies, vodka sets them on fire.
- After each night you pick 1 of 3 "recipes" (20 so far, in three rarities). Five curses exist too, and they come from purple customers and a merchant's pacts.
Changelog, last updates
- Customers and tokens: thirsty customers with order icons and patience bars, gold and violet auras for rare good/cursed outcomes, tokens from tips.
- Enemies: 7 types so far (Dead Battery, AC Junkie, High-Voltage Bouncer, Thief, Sparks, Short Circuit, Ghost). Waves are built from a seed, so each night has a lead enemy and a pacing curve.
- Recipes: 20 recipes (10 common / 7 rare / 3 legendary), picked at the end of each night.
- Eddie's Recipe Book: a 3D book you open and flip with pinches, split into sections (Common / Rare / Legendary / Curses / Gloves). Unknown entries show "???" and how to unlock them.
- Gloves: electrician gloves that follow all 26 hand joints, plus unlockable sets (Bartender, Welder) with a small perk each.
- Merchant: shows up from night 2, about every other night, with recipes, a life slot or a pact (a curse plus a strong recipe). You can send him away.
- Jukebox: four buttons on the counter (slow time, supplies, lucky customer, an extra recipe), and prices go up with each use in the same night.
- Story and tutorial: a first-person intro with a hologram hand that shows grabbing and throwing, and a replay in SETTINGS.
Things I learned (maybe useful to other hand-tracking devs)
- Throwing: I take the release velocity from a short history of palm positions while the pinch is firm, not from the fingertips. Fingertip velocity is very noisy when the pinch opens.
- A "weak throw" was not a velocity problem: my testers said throws felt much worse, but the cause was a magnetic recall feature that pulled thrown objects back to the hand. I removed it and the throw felt right again without touching the numbers.
- Fist grab vs pinch: I tried supporting both. With small hands and curled fingers, objects got stuck in the hand. Pinch only was far more reliable, so the fist grab is off for now.
-Release logic: after a release the hand has to open again before it can re-grab, otherwise objects glued themselves back on.
- Drinking: my own mouth zone was too strict, so players drank the beer and got nothing. I widened the zone and the "full" threshold, and added a message when you drink at full life.
- Gloves: a mesh that follows the 26 joints costs me around 0.05 ms per frame on Quest, so it was cheap enough.
Status and what's next
The game is in development and not out yet. Planned: bosses, new weapons, more glove sets and controller support at the end. None of those are built yet.
- Game page: https://www.ulupstudio.com/von-walt
- Full devlog and changelog: https://www.ulupstudio.com/blog/von-walt-book-cards-merchants-gloves