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!
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:
400sqft of green muslin + 2 layers of black, a 2000 watt light kit, Logitech C930e webcam and Blue Yeti mic, total: $1000 cad
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.
Syncing: we move the in-game camera to line up real and virtual hand positionsOur first trials used OBS to combine three views. We stuck a webcam on a tripod and synced it’s position with two in-game 3rd-person cameras. One only saw foreground objects, and the other only saw the sky, ground, and objects behind the headset. We first tried using a clipping pane, then tried blipping game objects between two visibility layers.
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!
Lindsay builds, Colin and Gord adviseWe’ve got some in-game tools to use while streaming, like a floating Twitch comments feed that only the player can see, and director controls that let our “couchies” swap the view between various game cameras.
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.
Have you wished Rebuild 3 was harder? Easier? Wished children aged at a realistic rate or more new survivors were soldiers? Have you wished Rebuild 3 was written in your native language, or just want to rename Gustav to “Mr Mustachio”?
Well now you can have it all, with only a little work on your part (note: full language packs are actually a LOT of work, mail me if you want to get in on a team effort for one).
I’ve added proper Steam Workshop mod support in version 1.5, so you can create mods and share them with others. You can now change all the system, difficulty and game configuration settings (including ones like GOAT_YEAR, finally – I know how that one has been bugging you).
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!
