One developer, one court, a lot of missed shots along the way
Eon Nexus is a solo game studio run by Connor Banting, based in Ottawa, Canada. Right now it is one project: Get Buckets VR, a roomscale basketball game for Meta Quest that has been in development since the idea refused to leave me alone, which is usually how these things start.
The starting point was a simple frustration with how most VR sports games handle the parts of the real sport that are not the point. Real backyard basketball is shooting, retrieving the ball, and shooting again. The retrieving part is not the fun part. It is the tax you pay to keep shooting. So the whole project began from one rule: automate the tax, keep the rhythm. Balls return to the rack on their own, there is no artificial locomotion to fight, and nothing stands between you and the next shot except your own form.
That rule turned out to have a second benefit I did not fully plan for going in: a game with no smooth locomotion and no forced movement between shots is a lot easier on players who get motion sick in VR. Comfort was not the original pitch, it was a side effect of chasing the right feel, but it became a design pillar once it was clear how many people that opens the game up to.
Built solo, on purpose
Everything in Get Buckets VR, design, code, art direction, level layout, and now this website, comes out of one person's time. That is a deliberate choice rather than a budget constraint. Working solo means every decision about feel, from ball weight to how a scoreboard yaws to face you, gets made by the same person who has to live with the consequences in headset. The devlog on this site exists because a lot of that process, the physics simulations, the debugging tools, the shipping mistakes, is worth writing down properly rather than losing to memory.
Under the hood, Get Buckets VR is built in Unity 6 with the Universal Render Pipeline, using OpenXR and the Meta XR SDK for input and tracking, and shipped as an IL2CPP, ARM64-only build, which is what the Meta Horizon Store requires for Quest titles.
Get in touch
Bug reports, press inquiries, feedback on a mode, or just want to talk shop about roomscale design or gameplay ballistics: reach me directly at [email protected].