After two months in quarantine, I’ve mostly made peace with the new normal. The Groundhog Day sameness can work to your favor when you have a long to-do list. We already worked from home, so the shutdown didn’t effect our work, aside from eliminating my side hustle/fitness regimen as a lifeguard at the local pool. I do miss swimming. Yoga on youtube is lovely, but can’t hold a candle to the cardio, muscle, and meditative aspects of a pool workout. Before the virus shutdown, it hadn’t occurred to me that the pool could be indefinitely unavailable. I miss the immersion. But, the planet has clearly had enough of destructive humans. Perhaps COVID19 is our time-out, a reminder that we’re all on this planet together and we need to take care of it and each other more kindly.
So, aside from contemplating existential issues and missing our friends, what have we been up to at Cascade Game Foundry? Ferociously tackling the to-do list and contract gigs, as usual as we can be. Some highlights…
Since dive shops are among the small business casualties caused by COVID19 – we are working with DEMA to provide free codes for Infinite Scuba to dive shops as something they can give to their audiences via newsletters or social media, to help them keep diving front-of-mind while real-life diving and travel are on hold. Through this outreach, we have met so many wonderful diving and ocean fans we might not have ordinarily. We’ve also had more requests for using the game in home-school scenarios, which we have always provided for free, as we do for conventional school settings.
We adapted Dive with Sylvia VR to support Windows MR hardware, so it now runs on that as well as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Thanks to our new contacts at Microsoft – we are excited to see where this new relationship leads!
We have also been approached by VR arcades who want to offer Dive with Sylvia VR, so we adapted the experience for their use, when they re-open.
Infinite Scuba is now available for sale on the Windows Store – we only had a free trial out there until a few weeks ago. Mac store version is in progress now for release this summer.
We’re still working on our Salish Sea dive site, at our typical slow-but-stable pace. It is awesome to see our local diving grounds finally come together and come alive for release! We are super excited to share this with the kids we meet doing school outreach and at the Pacific Science Center – too many people don’t know what’s in their local waters. If people know what lives there, they will want to protect them.
Last, we did a cool VR gig for robotic surgery prep. Fascinating to use this tech in a medical setting.
So, we’re busy!! We miss the in-person camaraderie of friends and music and environmental events. With environmental events cancelled and the Pacific Science Center closed, our next in-person event is possibly Tacoma Ocean Festival, which postponed from June to September.
We are beyond thankful to have work we can do from home, and to have unexpected time and focus to tackle our to-do list.
Stay safe and healthy out there! We’re here when you need a few moments of blissful underwater Zen.