As Louisiana recovers from a dreadful hurricane season, virtual reality game developer King Crow Studios wants to help rebuild.

The destruction caused by Hurricanes Laura and Delta affected Cody Louviere, King Crow Studios’ founder, personally. A Lake Charles native, he’s been working with his mother, father, and siblings to save and repair their homes in the middle of these back-to-back natural disasters.

Louviere decided to make King Crow Studios’ newest game, Hive Slayer, free, but asks fans to donate whatever they can to the Community Foundation of Southwest Louisiana’s hurricane relief and recovery fund.

How to Help With Hurricane Relief

Gamers can download Hive Slayer and make donations through Itch.io, an open marketplace for independent digital creators. The game requires a VR headset to play. People can directly go through the fundraiser’s site if they want to support our community, but do not have a VR headset.

This fundraiser helps those in need in two ways: A first phase where funds are distributed to pay for food, shelter, medicine, and other necessities to stabilize the community, and a second phase that focuses on rebuilding and long-term recovery.

“Both phases are equally important to the community affected by Hurricanes Laura and Delta and we spent a great deal of time deciding which fundraiser to support,” Louviere says.

The starting donation for Hive Slayer is $1, but multiple contributions would make a massive difference to the community. “We decided to do the fundraiser to give back to our community,” Louviere says. “We do not currently have an expected donation amount as this is our first release, and VR game releases can be quite tricky as it is still a technology in its early adoption phase, but we are hoping to raise $1,000 or more.”

Creating Hive Slayer

King Crow Studios took about a full year of active development to complete Hive Slayer.

“This is a small-scale project for us. We pulled in many LSU students to work on it, so it has been in development for a significantly shorter period of time than our other titles currently in active development,” Louviere says. “The initial goal of Hive Slayer was to make a quality game that we could turn around quickly while giving local LSU students game dev experience in the industry.”

Hive Slayer blends the classic style of an arcade shooting game with the power of VR. Players can challenge friends to see who can get the highest score in local play or climb to the top of online leaderboards.

“We always intended for this game to be released for free as a calling card to show fans what we can do and encourage them to keep an eye out for us when we release our premium titles in the future,” Louviere says. “The fundraising option came from the need that we saw around us in our community.”