Yeeps: Hide and Seek is an App Lab sleeper hit that the developers say reached 360,000 monthly-active users, even before its debut on the main Quest store this week. Speaking to Road to VR, the studio shares the impetus of the project and where it’s headed next.
Created by Trass Games, Yeeps: Hide and Seek was developed over an eight-month period, culminating in a Closed Alpha launch in February 2024. The game officially launched on App Lab in March, and just this week launched on the main Quest store.
The development team, consisting of co-founders Jack Southard, Nathan Jew, and Steve Shockey, created Yeeps through a collaborative process. As the developers explain, “The three of us, Jack, Nathan, and Steve, pitched three different game ideas. We took elements from each, then consolidated them into Yeeps.”
Yeeps prominently features arm-based locomotion, a system popularized by VR titles like Gorilla Tag. The developers acknowledge the inspiration. “We have a lot of admiration for Gorilla Tag and the arm locomotion system they pioneered. We knew it was the future of VR locomotion, at least in the social playground genre.”
However, Yeeps aims to differentiate itself through additional features. “We added more depth to [the locomotion] with gadgets like bombs and gliders,” the team explains. “We saw how games like Fortnite have evolved the battle royale genre with fun playful items and knew we could do the same with Yeeps in VR.”
A key focus of Yeeps is user-generated content (UGC), driven by the past experience of the team. “As kids, we sunk thousands of hours into social UGC games like Minecraft. We knew the power of these expressive building systems and set out to build a VR-native one with Yeeps.”
Since its App Lab launch, Trass Games reports significant user adoption. “Since we launched on App Lab on March 14th, 2024, Yeeps has grown to around 360,000 MAU,” the team says. With the [launch on the main Quest store], we are confident the player base will continue to grow rapidly.”
The game has also garnered a significant number of user reviews. According to the developers, it was just three months after its App Lab launch that Yeeps surpassed VR classic SUPERHOT to become the 10th most-reviewed VR game of all time, while managing to exceed SUPERHOT’s average review score. The game currently has more than 31,000 ratings to SUPERHOT’s 18,000. Granted, Yeeps is free-to-play while SUPERHOT is priced at $25.
Trass Games has outlined plans for regular content updates to Yeeps. “We are committed to frequent content updates that add new gadgets, blocks, game mechanics, and even biomes. We are especially excited to further develop the social UGC side of Yeeps and empower creators to build and share entire worlds with the entire community,” the team says.
Trass Games was founded in 2022 by Jack Southard and Nathan Jew, who say they met in their freshman year of high school in 2015 and began building games together. They say they built 30 small game projects together before discovering VR in their senior year of high school.
Their first VR project was Overboard, released on Steam in 2019, a “ridiculous VR game about fighting bloodthirsty and increasingly deadly sharks using makeshift weapons.”
When the pandemic hit in 2020, they become compelled to build a multiplayer VR game. That led them to build and release Gods of Gravity in 2021, which was fairly well received on Quest.
The studio says that Gods of Gravity gained the attention of the venture capital firm A16Z, which invited Trass Games to its Speedrun accelerator, an early-stage investment program focused on game development. The program invests $750,000 in participating companies.
Following the accelerator, Trass Games doubled its team from three to six, bringing on new artists with the goal to “take everything we had learned from making Gods of Gravity and make a new free social game that was bigger and better in every way.”
Despite getting a head-start with the A16Z Speedrun program, the studio says it doesn’t plan to take additional investment. “While we plan to slowly grow our team, we are confident in our ability to scale Yeeps as a small, efficient team. As such, we do not plan on taking any funding,” the studio tells Road to VR.