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!
It’s as cool as it sounds. We’ve started live streaming Fantastic Contraption on our Twitch stream every Thursday at noon PST. Here’s this past week’s stream:
Twitch isn’t just for e-sports and speedruns anymore; it’s getting downright mainstream as a marketing tool, a way for people to check games out before buying them, participate in events, and to obsess over games while at work / any moment they can’t be playing them (guilty!). But for months we’ve been asking: how the hell do you stream virtual reality games? Especially room-scale VR using the HTC Vive?
The standard picture-in-picture game footage + webcam technique doesn’t do VR justice. The first-person in-game feed from VR games gives at best a cropped, distorted view of what the player is actually seeing, and talking heads wearing VR headsets are even duller than regular talking heads. After an hour-long session with Youtuber Northernlion, we did some brainstorming.
Then we geared up:
Our livingroom has huge windows on two sides, so it was a challenge to keep the green screen lighting consistent (bedsheets and cardboard were involved). But we discovered that our webcam feed has considerably less lag during the day when all that natural light lowers exposure time.
We output the in-game cameras side-by-side then smushed the 3 feeds together in OBS:
It’s not half bad without the green screens too, if you overlay the background camera at 50% transparency.
But for our next stream we’re going to try piping the live webcam feed into Fantastic Contraption, so we can display it on a moving plane in the game. This should give us fewer blipping glitches and a higher output resolution. Thanks to Edwon for the suggestion and help!
We’ll keep things fresh by bringing on special guests, and will be reaching out to local Vancouver Twitch streamers to come stream from our rad green screen studio (aka our livingroom). Stay tuned, Thursdays at noon PST!
We were recently featured by Made with Unity in a short film – a really beautiful vanity piece by Breakwater Studios, all about the Northways and our love of virtual reality. We spent a couple days filming with Ben Proudfoot and cinematographer David Bolen, and experimented with some neat VR / reality overlays. At one point we duct-taped a third Vive controller to a portable camera and used it for positional tracking for the in-game camera.
The results are so damn COOL!:
(my favorite shot is at 2:57)
We also did an interview for Made with Unity if you aren’t done gagging over how adorable we are. I’m so happy I’ve joined the project now and get to work with Colin again, but we can’t stress enough that Northway Games is only half of Team Fantastic Contraption, and that Radial Games have been here every step of the way, waist-deep in this surreal virtual reality world we’re building together.
This is from a series of posts I wrote about Fantastic Contraption when I originally released it. They were originally published on our travelogue but I have back dated them and moved them over here where they fit in more.
This is a post I wrote on the Fantastic Contraption forums. Someone (OfficiallyHaphazard) asked me a few questions and I ended up writing a whole thing.
It was an attepmt to sum up this particular life-altering experience.
The original thread is here: http://fantasticcontraption.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1212&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
Hey guys.
Sorry I don’t post much. Sorry I don’t get more bug fixes out.
This has been an incredibly overwhelming experience for me. Weasel’s bang on in all his answers. But I can offer my perspective. Come with me on a trip down memory lane.
Imagine yourself a corporate web developer. You are a .Net and SQL server ninja. You hate microsoft but accident and the world have made you really good with their web-dev suite. Which is not an easy thing to be good at.
So, my young ninja, you decide to move to San Francisco after taking a year traveling in asia. You end up in a job really quickly. There is a ton of work in this city. The job looked really good on the packaging. But after you sit down and start taking on projects you realise most of your day is going to be hacking asp and tweaking existing sites. “can we add another item to that dropdown?”. And every time you drop a wicked prototype for a database-enabled flash front-end on them they look at you like you just dropped a turd on their desk.
Seven months pass. You are a thoroubread greyhound (who can’t spell) forced to jog beside a fat owner. You are the bazooka swatting flies. You are bored out of your gord. You listen to the entire back-log of “this american life”.
But then you get this idea. Out of the blue, an idea. A game. Kind of like Armadillo Run, kind of like the Increible Machine. But with a twist. Instead of making an environment that the armadillo moves through, you make an armadillo that moves through the environment. You’re pretty sure this is a good idea. You run it past a few friends who’s opinions you respect (weasel) and they also think it’s a good idea.
So, what the hell, you’ve got alot of creative energy left at the end of the day. Pretty soon every spare waking hour is writing code and learning flash. No weekends for four months. Hoping to get sick so you can stay home and write code.
Ideas are considered and rejected, flash is puzzled over and solved, bugs come and go. A game begins to take shape.
Eventually menus and graphics are made, everything ends up actually working pretty well. And your family and friends doing the beta-testing are hooked.
Time to put it out into the world. Forget ads. Ads suck. And forget selling it to a portal. You made it, you’re going to host it. So try charging a few bucks for the level editor and mabey it will buy us all a round at the pub.
And up it goes. You bootleg some bandwidth off of a friend for 10$ a month. Announcing this momentus event are two blog-posts. One on your travel log that gets zero traffic, and one on weasel’s bloggy web-space-thing. That gets alot more traffic than yours but not a ton.
A few days pass. Life goes on as expected. The game gets a few small blog posts. A small gaming site links to it and the users rate it pretty well on that site. Then, one fateful sunday, you come home to 20,000 users on the server.
Stumble-Upon has found you and likes what it sees. From then on it’s a roller-coaster ride to over 1 million views in the second month of release (august). This rollercoaster is punctuated by constant server meltdowns. A steady stream of server upgrades and massive database changes are the only thing keeping the hungry behemoth at bay. Even with all your best efforts the servers still spend the better part of some days offline and when they are up it takes 3 minutes to save. People start writing you emails: ‘how much money do you want to put it on our portal?’, ‘how much to make an iphone version?’, “we’re discussing the possibility of a DS version of your game internally. Are you interested?”. Pretty heady stuff. And you’re getting these emails while trying to write asp code at the day-job.
So the day job has to go. The game is making more money than your day-job is at this point anyway (thank you everyone, and a bunch of it gets kicked back to almost everyone in the credits page).
The last day of real in-the-office work is August 8th. Just under a month from the day of release. Not that now your life is easy. This is in the middle of the server meltdowns. But eventually you switch hosts, become a reasonably skilled DBA, and things start running smooth.
But behind the maelstrom crazy things are happening. People are playing the game hard. They are doing amazing things, mind-blowing things. You have now gotten your head around 1 million page views in terms of server resources. But not in terms of actual people playing the game. And mabey that’s a good thing. Mabey you’ll pay a good friend to get his head around it instead. Mabey if you spent too long on the forums or too long flipping through levels and solutions your life will be paralyzed by the idea that _millions_ of people are playing, loving, and hating, your game.
Can you really imagine what that means? Millions of people? I can’t.
I know when I went to PAX the Wizards of the Coast guys treated me like a rock-star. I know people at Blizzard play my game. Gaming heroes know Fantastic Contraption.
And all of it leaves me just stunned.
It’s hard to think about Fantastic Contraption now. About the things that need improving. I probably won’t be spending alot of time on it. It is wildly succesful as it is. There are things that could be much better. But I might leave those for Fantastic Contraption 2. Or some totaly different game. I can let my imagination go wild and play with game ideas _full time_ now.
Interesting times though. Even if I don’t spend a ton of time on the game from now on it looks you guys might get the game that you deserve anyway. The polished game with a good level browser and graphics that took more than two weekends to knock out. I don’t want to jinx it but there could be some very exciting news in the future indeed.
This is from a series of posts I wrote about Fantastic Contraption when I originally released it. They were originally published on our travelogue but I have back dated them and moved them over here where they fit in more.
So I have been ruminating on this really weird question. Why am I writing/hosting/keeping up this game?
It’s a weird question because I totally love it. I loved writing it (mostly) and I love that people play it. And I’ve gotten all these great compliments which I love. Some favorite quotes: “I play a lot of online games and this is the best one I have ever played” (in this case online means flash), and “this might be the perfect game”. These aren’t even things people have said to me. They are reviews and comments on random blogs.
I love everything about it. But damn it it’s exhausting. Sarah accused me of acting bi-polar today because I’ll be all up and happy and then alternately down and doomfull. It’s not the work. The only real work I’ve done has been hanging out on the forums and doing a few bug fixes. It’s the just the mental energy of having this amazing thing in the world that people seem to love.
It’s like I have a duty to think about it constantly. Like I am morally obligated to make it more and more popular. Like it is wrong to just sit on my hands and see what happens. I should be doing user studies and improving the hits to player conversion. I should be pimping it on flash sites and making deals with portals. I should write embedable solutions to leverage the power of social networking sites. gah, so much to do. The list is literally endless.
Every time I manage to calm down for a minute something awesome happens. Like people have started buying the game. Not in droves but enough that we’ll have some scratch to spread around to the various people who made this possible. And every time I get a little email pop-up saying someone else has bought it it’s like a tiny injection of heroin.
I mean I’m a professional programmer so the idea of being paid to write code is not novel. But being so close to the spigot is kind of like staring into the sun. That little pop-up just meant some stranger, that I have never met, decided something I made was worth actual money.
It’s an experience I’ve never had before and I’m just not sure how to handle it. It’s like I can feel the game changing my future but I can’t tell in what way it’s changing. Will I end up in flash development? Corporate website flash? Game flash? Will it change nothing? I do know I like it. I guess I’ll just stay strapped to the roller-coaster and see where it’s going.