Blacksmith VR is a room-scale virtual reality game where you become a blacksmith and craft gear for adventures via Cooking Mama-like mini-games. There is a strong focus on the physicality of crafting, so you use both hands to hold a variety of tools and shape bars of metal into weapons and armor. For example, you hold a bar of metal with tongs in your left hand and hammer it with the hammer in your right hand to shape a blade. Then you take it over to the carving station, pick up a chisel with your left hand and a mallet with your right, and carve runes into the blade. We want every action to utilize the full interaction space of virtual reality with two tracking controllers.

You’re given work orders to fulfill that will boost your reputation and allow you to expand your workshop with more crafting stations, further unlocking a larger variety of advanced work orders. A single work order tells you want the adventurer wants, but it’s up to you to decide on what piece of gear best suits the order. You are graded on each crafting station and how many of the work order requirements you achieved.

We really wanted to give the player as much freedom as possible and let them experiment in the workshop and come to understand on their own, with proper in-game feedback, what works best and what won’t work at all. A requirement on a work order for shoulder pads could say “must have spikes”, but it’s up to the player to decide where they go on the pads and how many there are. Two players won’t necessarily make the same gear, and built-in social sharing features can help showcase the work you’re most proud of.

First prototype:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ6U5dSj59s

Hammering mini-game prototype:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSTRMekZNaU