Castle Rush was developed during the 2016 Innovation Week hackathon event at the Bega Valley Regional Learning Centre, and it has taken Reload Bar and Games, right in the heart of Canberra, by storm.

Ravi Sharma, one of the bar’s proprietors said the game’s ability to bring together virtual reality and phone gaming makes it perfect for social environments.

“I knew before we tested it, it would be successful,” Mr Sharma said.

“It really pushes the boundaries in virtual reality and augmented reality, and maintains a crowd social aspect to it.”

Designed to bring people together, it is a multi-player virtual reality game where one to three players wearing a headset defends a castle against other players attacking from their phones.

Mr Sharma, who is himself a software developer, said the genre is known as “couch co-op”, where players sit comfortably and work together as teammates.

“Just because it’s a good game doesn’t mean it will be good for a gaming bar,” Mr Sharma said.

“For example, popular one-player games like Destiny and Fallout are better played at home.

“We feature multiplayer games with short rounds like Mario Kart or Super Smash Bros. where it can be over in five minutes.”

Mr Sharma discovered the game by chance, while researching online.

“We do general scouring of the whole world looking for games, and stumbled across it,” he said.

“Since we launched it about a year ago it has been upgraded so you don’t even have to look at your phone anymore because it used augmented reality.”

One of Castle Rush’s developers Brennan Hatton, who spent a number of years in Silicon Valley, said an aspect of the game design was to lure new users to the worlds of virtual reality.

“We wanted to draw people in who would previously not be included, like older people who may not want to put the headset on but can use their phones,” he said.

“It’s a way to draw people into virtual reality in a non-threatening way.”

He conceived the game during the Hackagong Bega event, along with Annie Harper, BuzzyTV members and game developers Byron and Andrew Papanikolaou.

“We went in with the idea to make something with virtual reality to work in a public setting,” Mr Hatton said.

“While someone is on the virtual reality headset, what does everyone else do?

“They wait around, and can feel excluded.”

He said the casual design of the game has helped grow its popularity in the social atmosphere of the bar.

“You don’t even have to download it, and you can just use one hand to play,” he said.

“You can play while having a conversation, or become fully involved.”

He said the fact the game was developed in the Bega Valley and is now making money, shows anything is possible in rural and regional Australia.

“We brought the game to the Bega Valley Gamer Dev Jam last year to show people it is being played internationally, and it came from Bega through pushing boundaries,” he said.