Owlchemy Labs, the developers behind the hugely popular Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives are at it again with their follow-up videogame Vacation Simulator. During E3 2018, some of the developers took to the stage to discuss the title.
Revealed late last year, Vacation Simulator is following the same vein as its predecessor with light-hearted humour to be found throughout the experience. Planned to be bigger and better, players will be able to jump into a simulation of what a vacation might be like and be able to vacation like it’s their job.
Devin Reimer of Owlchemy Labs said that the title takes place in what the team call the bot universe. This means that the title is set in the same universe as Job Simulator, in which robots have taken over all labour. Reimer says: “The big difference here is that jobs made lot of sense to the bots, but now they have built this vacation simulator and are like ‘why would you relax?’”
The title will include a number of different areas for players to explore, offering a wide variety of activities to enjoy including grilling burgers for Bots and even some yoga. Chelsea Howe explains: “One of the big design challenges for us was providing something for everyone since everyone vacations a little bit differently. So we had to have different activities, so you can solve puzzles or you can do sports or fill our quest ordrs. Something for everyone.”
“When we started working on Job Simulator we realised that having your hands available was the key. The hands and physics and interacting with a world that’s super dense and super cool. We’ve just been continuously building on that. Now we have this great framework that we can push even further.”
“As a studio we rarely work on the same genre twice,” Reimer says, “So in Vacation Simulator we thought ‘what if we made it more like an adventure game?’, so everything is connected, which is quite different to what we’ve done in the past.”
Asked about the humour in Vacation Simulator and other Owlchemy Labs titles, Chelsea Howe said: “Some of the key is to have the mechanics themselves be humorous and silly. Like when you play with sports bot on the beach you can give sports bot a popsicle you’ll play ‘ed-a-ball’ and you’ll get a food cannon towards your mouth.”
Vacation Simulator is planned to be released later this year for Oculus Touch, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. VRFocus will be sure to bring you all the latest on the title moving forward and you can watch the full interview below.