If you want something different to all the shooting titles available for HTC Vive a good place to start is quirky puzzle videogame Fantastic Contraption. Developed in partnership between Northway Games and Radial Games, it originally came supplied with free with every purchase of the headset until August when its was swapped out. This week the developers have announced a big update for the title, called ‘Kaiju’, which should give players an indication of what to expect.
There are several major features added to Fantastic Contraption, the first being a new scaling option to allow new ways to play. This allows users to scale from 50% of regular room scale size all the way down to 10% room scale which makes everything look like a miniature set of contraption pieces. When using scaling the controller flowers shrink down to smaller precision buds so that players can easily see what they’re doing.
Northway states on its update listing: “If your VR hardware is configured for a small space, the Room Setup menu will appear automatically the first time you play. You can force Fantastic Contraption into Kaiju Scale and reconfigure your space via the companion menu on your monitor.”
Then there’s the Companion Eye-Cam. Now players can take their eyes out attach them to a contraption then switch on the companion-camera to follow the eyes around. This essentially means viewers watching on a monitor get an even better perspective.
Rating contraptions has got easier with a new way to keep track of them. Now users smooch their favourite contraptions both local and online. Smooching them now adds hearts, causing the to rise up the ranks on the “Online Contraptions for this Level” shelves.
Check out the full changelog below for all the improvements the developers have made, and keep reading VRFocus for all the latest VR news.
Full ‘Kaiju’ changelog:
- Kaiju Scale: full support for playing in smaller spaces including seated. (Re)configure world size and orientation via the companion menu on your monitor (settings > standing scale > configure standing). Config will automatically run once if SteamVR is set to “Standing Only”.
- Steam Workshop support for modding Neko skins. See our Steam Workshop and Modding Instructions
- Workshop support for other languages. See our Steam Workshop and Modding Instructions
- Japanese language support. Change language via the companion menu on your monitor. Other languages coming eventually and/or create your own using Steam Workshop.
- Rate and fave saved contraptions by giving them a smooch
- Throw level from maquette to frog to delete autosave and revert
- New avatars and improved avatar model physics
- Change avatar by using the touchpad while grabbing maquette
- New avatar hats and improved existing hat models
- Twitch chat voting on avatars and hats with “!avatar wolf” or “!hat 5”, defaults to 60 second rounds. Twitch mods can disable, trigger rounds, or force a change immediately.
- Avatar shadows
- Command-line arguments to run in demo mode, eg “-demo”. Contact us for full list
- Rearranged things in dark world
- Combined level and contraption save tables into one
- New look for Neko
- Highlight Neko’s parts when you’re close enough to grab them
- Improve Neko animation performance
- New look and animation for victory spheres
- Improve stereo shader rendering
- Tweaks to tutorial messages
- Hourglass loading indicator
- Fade out effects
- Selection highlighting on camera bug and some other things
- Sound tweaks
- Tweak and tune all haptic responses
- Added arrows to tutorial umbilicals
- Minor tweaks to several levels (must delete autosaves to see)
- Hide online contraptions made with newer incompatible game versions
- Fix helmet obstructing first person companion view
- Fix error on loading corrupt save files
- Fix Twitch panel error and bloat
- Fix SteamVR init crash
- Fix physics issues caused by variable framerate
- Fix respawn delay after taking items from Neko
- Fix hitting start/stop while loading
- Fix several levels so they’ll break less
- Fix snaps disappearing or being where they shouldn’t
- Fix and tweaks to camera bug
- Fix Neko’s missing eyes on blink with helmet
- Fix spelling “comfortably”