Find out what the guy behind masochist-sim Dogelus2 thinks of letting a lolita step on your face

Last week, we posted a story about a Dogelus2, an Oculus Rift game that lets you get stepped on by a lolita. The premise is that you prostrate yourself in an apologetic bow before a little girl, who will then humiliate you under her heel.

To be honest, I was expecting a more humorous or weird angle, and perhaps a glimpse into the mind of a guy who’d make a game like that when I contacted Kenji Takahashi, the creator of Dogelus2. But what I got instead was insight on the future of the Oculus Rift. And that made me really come to respect the guy and what he’s doing for the progression of virtual reality (VR) technology.

The History of Dogelus2, and its creator

When I conversed with Takahashi over how he came up with the idea for Dogelus to begin with, he struck me as being a lot more grounded than the game he developed seems to imply.

He told me that the idea for the Dogelus game first came about when he began using his Oculus Rift development kit, where he discovered that one of the restrictions of the technology is how you cannot move your in-game character.

“The game I came up with to avoid this problem was through dogeza, a style of sitting that does not require much head movement. This is how I began creating the first dogeza simulator Dogelus.”

In April 2014, the 3D character model for a character named Tune-chan was released for public usage. Takahashi spent just 30 minutes re-skinning the original Dogelus character with the Tune-chan skin. This was how the Dogelus2 game was created.

“I feel like the addition of a high heel shoes added a really nice touch”, he commented.

Takahashi has also made a whole bunch of other slightly more normal games, such as Oculus Heli, a helicopter pilot simulator game, and an Oculus Rift version of Tetris where you control where the blocks go by moving your head.

(See: Could virtual reality resurrect the game arcade in Asia?)

Takahashi, who developed those games alone but now works in a four-man development team named “hasilus”, said that he gets motion sickness easily when playing VR games, so he puts extra effort into making games that do not give users a sense of motion sickness.

The VR market in Japan

Takahashi expressed to me his thoughts that Japanese developers do not really see the Oculus Rift as being a gaming device. “While the rest of the world sees the Oculus Rift as being a potential gaming tool first and foremost, most developers in Japan see the Oculus Rift as more of a VR machine. This is mostly because PC gaming is not a big market in Japan at the moment.”

(See: What’s going on with the Oculus Rift in Japan?)