We’re working towards our next update, adding more stuff to track your progress and all the ways you can beat every level, and new tools to help show off contraptions on Twitch and Twitter. I’ve was looking through the shared solutions today and found some incredible ideas in there – we want to help share them with the world!
Today is the day! The HTC Vive is now shipping, and Fantastic Contraption is live on Steam. We’re so proud and lucky to be part of something so momentous – the first steps of the VR revolution. We’d like to congratulate all of the VR visionaries, brilliant hardware engineers, forward-thinking artists, game developers and enthusiasts who have inspired us and made this possible.
Valve’s new mixed-reality SteamVR trailer explains it perfectly: room scale VR is an immersive experience, a social experience. It’s weird and new and still rough around the edges, and it just might change your life the way it changed ours.
To celebrate, today we’re going to stream Vive games at twitch.tv/ColinNorthway. We’ll be doing it all day, or at least until Contraption support requests start coming in. We’ve moved our green screen to Roadhouse Interactive, but will continue our regular Contraption Stream on Thursdays at noon pst.
Join us now to celebrate Vive launch day!
Huh? What hand controllers are these…?
That’s right! We’re working to bring Fantastic Contraption to the Oculus with Oculus Touch controllers later this year. You may have also seen our recent teaser from Andy Moore of seated-scale Fantastic Contraption. We have plans to support seated-scale, standing-scale, room-scale and my favorite, sitting-on-the-floor scale on both the Oculus and Vive (after launch).
We just had a blast showing Fantastic Contraption at the Oculus Game Day event at the Game Developer Conference. And for the rest of the week we’ll be showing the game at the Independent Games Festival where we’ve been nominated for the prestigious Nuovo award. They announce the winners tonight. Come visit us at booth N2618 in the North Hall expo and wish us luck!
It’s official: the HTC Vive will be shipping on April 5th, and it will come with Fantastic Contraption, Job Simulator, and Tilt Brush. My 3 favorite things in VR right now!
I’m so stoked – it’s like being Super Mario Bros and/or Duck Hunt at the launch of the NES. The Vive could be the platform that changes everything… we just have to get enough people into it, because playing is believing. We showed Fantastic Contraption at a Vancouver Twitch event last week and people kept coming away stunned and stoked, trying to figure out where they’re going to fit a Vive in their apartments.
And yes you can now preorder the Vive for $800 USD, which is the adult equivalent of the $150 my sister and I saved to buy a NES back in the 80s. You also need a gaming PC – Nvidia 970 or higher – but the prices on these and on all VR hardware will come down pretty fast in the next couple years. So get out your measuring tape and start sizing up the living room for that 1.5 x 2m (5 x 6.5ft) minimum. Do you really need that coffee table? I didn’t think so.
Fantastic Contraption has been nominated for the prestigious IGF Nuovo award, and for Best VR Experience at the Vision VR/AR Awards (read more at our Road to IGF interview). The team is thrilled and we’ll be showing the game at both the IGF expo at the Game Developers Conference in March, and at the Vision summit next month in LA. Come visit us if you’re there!
