Apex Construct Has Sold Over 100K Copies, 50% in Last 12 Months

Apex Construct Oculus QUEST

When developers find success on Oculus Quest it seems to be big – or so the limited numbers suggest. Fast Travel Games launched its excellent bow shooter Apex Construct in 2018 for PlayStation VR, widening support to PC VR headsets soon after. New figures released this week show sales have remained strong over the past two years, especially in the last year since Oculus Quest’s arrival.

The studio announced in a tweet that Apex Construct has sold over 100,000 units across all supported platforms. What’s equally impressive is that 50% of these were in the last 12 months, as you’d expect to see that dip as interest wains for an older title.

So it’s easy to assume that bringing Apex Construct natively to Oculus Quest has helped in that endeavour. Oculus Quest arrived on 21st May 2019 and Apex Construct was part of the launch lineup. As part of the headsets own celebrations a couple of weeks ago, Facebook revealed that owners had spent over $100 million USD on content.

In March the company confirmed that 20 titles had generated $1 million in revenue, followed by 10 videogames on the store exceeding $2 million. These included Polyarc’s Moss and Cloudhead Games’ Pistol Whip. All of this is even more impressive when considering the stock shortages both Oculus and other companies have been facing due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Apex Construct Oculus QUEST

Obviously the figures aren’t anywhere near those easily achieved by flat titles on console or PC but any increase is beneficial for the industry as a whole.

Set in a surreal, almost alien world, where humanity has been wiped out apart from you, a war is being waged between two AI’s and you’re stuck in the middle. In this high-tech world you need to master an old-school weapon to survive, the bow.

Reviewing the PlayStation VR version of Apex Construct VRFocus wrote: “Despite some minor gripes, its clear that Apex Construct represents the way forward for VR videogames, an absorbing, intriguing experience that draws you in with a rich world complete with its own history and mysteries to be unravelled as well as a fluid combat system.”

As for recently released projects, Fast Travel Games updated its puzzler The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets with Oculus Quest’s hand tracking. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Apex Construct, reporting back with further updates.

Exclusive Interviews: ‘Waltz’ And ‘Curious Tale’ Devs Discuss Quest Hand Tracking Updates

Aldin Dynamics and Fast Travel Games are set to become the first developers with hand tracking support across their full games in the Oculus Quest Store.

Developers behind The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets (Fast Travel) and Waltz of the Wizard (Aldin) sat down exclusively with UploadVR in our virtual studio to discuss the updates.

The new feature will arrive in the games after Quest’s system software v17 rolls out fully to Oculus Quest standalone headsets around the world. The update will move hand tracking from its experimental phase into a general release feature. Quest system updates are typically distributed over the course of several days to stagger the release and ensure stability across all devices. Curious Tale was rated “really good” when we reviewed it last year while Waltz has been expanded for years now, with more updates planned and more than 400,000 people across all VR systems playing some version of the magic-infused title.

The new versions of Curious Tale and Waltz will be joined by Elixir, a tech demo first shown at Facebook’s last VR developers conference last year. On May 28, a pair of “cinematic narratives” with support for the feature will launch as Facebook begins to more broadly accept the submission of hand tracking updates from various developers to its store.

I spoke with Aldin Dynamics CEO Hrafn Thorisson about their path over more than half a decade building VR software for development kits, then Vive room-scale support in early 2016 and onto support for hand tracking in Waltz of the Wizard in 2020. Jamie Feltham sat down with Kristoffer Benjaminsson, CTO of Fast Travel Games, to discuss the new feature which lets you solve mysteries and recover missing pets with just your bare hands.

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Fast Travel Games To Reveal Its Next Project At Upload VR Showcase: Summer Edition

Here’s some news we wish we could fast travel right to; the developer of Apex Construct, The Curious Tale Of The Stolen Pets and more is coming to Upload’s VR Showcase: Summer Edition on June 8th.

Yep, Showcase regulars Fast Travel Games will return to the 2020 iteration of our big event with a brand new game reveal. At last year’s E3 VR Showcase, Fast Travel debuted cutesy VR puzzler, The Curious Tale Of The Stolen Pets (which just revealed hand-tracking support on Quest), and Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency, which it co-developed alongside Neat Corp. What could the team have in store for this year? No teases from us, but you’ll definitely want to tune in.

Fast Travel Games VR Showcase Tease

Fast Travel Games broke onto the VR scene in 2018 with Apex Construct, a VR adventure game that offered a full, story-driven campaign; not something that was very common at the time. Since then the team has become a big player in the industry with two Quest titles (a port of Apex and Curious Tale) and wider support for all headsets, including Sony’s PSVR. We can’t wait to see what it’s cooking up next.

The Upload VR Showcase: Summer Edition lands on June 8th (final time TBC). Fast Travel is bringing just one of over 20 upcoming titles we’ll be spotlighting this year, including fresh looks at some of your most anticipated games and all-new announcements. If you want to be the first to know what the next 12 months and beyond look like for your VR headset, you won’t want to miss it.

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Oculus Quest Hand Tracking Leaves Beta, Three Titles add Native Support

Hand Tracking on Quest still

Oculus Quest’s hand tracking has been available as a beta feature since December, providing limited functionality across system menus and first-party apps. Today, Oculus has announced that the technology is moving into general release with third-party apps adding hand tracking later this month.

Waltz of the Wizard hand tracking

Hand Tracking has been an optional extra which Oculus Quest owners could switch on via the Experimental Features section. It never meant you could put away your Oculus Touch controllers, simply helping you see where the tech was heading.

With the anniversary of Oculus Quest’s launch this week, that experimentation begins to change. On 28th May, Oculus will begin accepting third-party titles that include hand tracking to the Oculus Store, starting with Elixir from Magnopus; The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets by Fast Travel Games and Aldin Dynamics’ Waltz of the Wizard: Extended Edition.

Elixir puts you in an unstable alchemy lab where you can cast spells, mix potions, and poke a nauseated dragon. Actions allow you to obtain new and powerful hands, altering their anatomy in the process. Puzzle title The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets has been available for a while, with the developer previously teasing hand tracking capabilities. The same can also be said for Waltz of the Wizard: Extended Edition which recently rolled out new locomotion updates.

The Line

“Hand tracking really does enhance immersion and is the perfect fit for
The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets“, says James Hunt, Creative Lead on
the game in a statement. “It adds a whole new level of connection between the player and the miniature worlds with all their interactive elements. Things like picking up snowballs, waving a magic wand or just petting the pets once you’ve found them feels more real – and fun! – than ever  before.”

In addition to those three videogames, Oculus will also be launching the Cinematic Narratives Set featuring Gloomy Eyes and The Line. Two award-winning immersive experiences, their official Oculus Quest launch with native hand tracking will be on the 28th.

SideQuest has allowed developers to release hand tracking features (Tea for GodInterdimensional Matter) for Oculus Quest users since the SDK went live but this will be the first time via Oculus Store. Where appropriate – not all games will suit the tech – the store should see an influx of hand tracking over the summer, allowing gamers to put their controllers down for the first time.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Oculus Quest and its hand tracking, reporting back with further updates.

Oculus Quest Hand Tracking Teased for The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets

The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets

Ever since Oculus released hand tracking for Oculus Quest in December 2019, developers have been experimenting with the feature but its yet to appear for titles on the Oculus Store. That could be about to change thanks to Fast Travel Games.

In a teasing tweet today, the studio revealed plans to bring hand tracking to its puzzle title The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets, with no further details other than it was coming soon.

Due to the nature of its simple puzzle-based gameplay, The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets should be a good testbed for hand tracking as the videogame doesn’t require swift, complicated actions. Players can be methodical when exploring the spinnable 3D worlds, picking them apart to locate the pets, finding secrets and playing with the other interactive elements.

A delightful VR experience set around a heart-warming tale narrated by the players’ grandfather, The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets is one of those titles that isn’t overly long but easily suits players of any age. They can grip, push, drop and spin the numerous elements in each world to unlock clues, with some puzzles requiring multiple elements to complete. Others just need a keen eye.

The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets

When reviewing Fast Travel Games’ latest, VRFocus noted: “The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets is a perfectly pleasant VR experience which features all the polish you’d expect from Fast Travel Games.” The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets arrived last year for Oculus Quest, PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality headsets.

Not all the videogames for Oculus Quest will suit hand tracking as it does have plenty of limitations, plus the feature is still in beta. So it may be some time until more content on Oculus Store goes more hands-on. Another developer which detailed its experiments earlier this year was Aldin Dynamics and Waltz of the Wizard.

Or for hand tracking examples you can actually play with, head on over to SideQuest where you’ll find the likes of Tea for God and Interdimensional Matter. For further Oculus Quest hand tracking updates, keep reading VRFocus.

Watch: Curious Tale Quest Hand-Tracking Tease Suggests Official Integration Nears

A tease from Fast Travel Games may suggest Facebook will soon let developers officially integrate hand-tracking into their Oculus Quest titles.

Fast Travel just teased support for hand-tracking in its charming puzzler, The Curious Tale Of The Stolen Pets. The GIF in the below tweet shows a player interacting with the game’s diorama-sized world, using their finger to push a dog on a swing. It works just like it did with the controller, except now you don’t need to hold anything in your hands.

The tweet simply says ‘Coming Soon’, with no other details. As far as we’re aware, this is the first time a developer has shown official integration of hand-tracking in a game available on the Oculus Store.

Quest hand-tracking was launched as an experimental feature late last year. Officially, you can only use it in Quest’s menu and on the Oculus web browser, but developers have integrated the feature into their sideloaded projects, too. Over the past few months, Facebook has improved the stability of the tracking with multiple updates. Fast Travel’s tease suggests Oculus may be preparing to let developers officially integrate the feature into their titles on the Oculus Store.

We’ve asked Facebook if official integration for Quest hand-tracking is nearing.

That said, don’t expect every Quest game to get hand-tracking support. Curious Tale — which we’re very fond of — seems like an especially good fit considering it’s a stationary puzzle game, but titles with lots of locomotion and fast-paced mechanics might not suit it.

What other Oculus Quest games would you like to get hand-tracking support? Let us know in the comments below!

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Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency’s Latest Update is all About Performance

Budget Cuts 2

If being stuck in your home all day has any benefits then its the excuse to play new videogames or revisit previously played ones. Neat Corporation and Fast Travel Games only released Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency in December 2020 and whether you have or haven’t played it, today’s performance update and sale may make the title an enticing one. 

Budget Cuts 2

“During the development of BC2 we made significant advancements regarding performance compared to BC1. Despite this, some users were reporting bad performance, so we started digging even further for this update. The primary problem has been CPU performance, so we’ve reworked a couple parts entirely in order to bring CPU usage down further, as well as utilize a rendering feature we had previously overlooked. We did also fix a few bugs and add a couple new mutators along the way,” notes Fast Travel Games’ CMO Andreas Juliusson in a statement.

If you’ve not played either, the Budget Cuts series is a comedy infused stealth experience involving knives, a unique teleportation gun, squeezing into ventilation systems (and other small spaces) and a deadly bow. While being sneaky is encouraged you can still opt for action if you so wish.

Budget Cuts 2Budget Cuts 2 changelog:

  • New Mutators!
    • Mutator: Smooth turning (replaces snap-turning when enabled)
    • Mutator: Unarmed Supervisors
    • Mutator: Fragile knives and arrows
    • Mutator: Translocator launch force
    • Mutator: Stealth Translocator (brings back stealth translocations from BC1)
  • Windows Mixed Reality controller mesh
  • Distance grabbing improvements
  • Some distance interactions (swipe cards at a distance and more)
  • Multithreaded AI vision system rewrite
  • Single Pass Instanced Rendering
  • Multithreaded custom physics force calculations
  • Conductor scene significant performance improvements
  • Skyscraper scene savegame bugfix
  • Flattened hierarchies in scenes for performance boost
  • Controller optimizations
  • Physics optimizations
  • Spectator screen no longer has a border and takes up the full screen
  • Items no longer pile up at world origin on load (in certain scenes)
  • Checkpoints now immediately save the status of the game, fixing various save game bugs
  • Inventory stability fixes, no more invisible items
  • Unarmed state improvements for Supervisors
  • More accurate shot leading for Supervisors when using higher Aim skill mutators
  • Unity updated to 2018.4.21 (brings draw call optimizations and more)

Supporting Oculus Rift/Rift S, HTC Vive and Valve Index, Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency is available on Oculus Store and Steam, with both platforms offering a 45 percent discount for a limited time. For all the latest Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency updates, keep reading VRFocus.

The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets Coming to PlayStation VR on Disk Next Month

Fast Travel Games launched its award-winning (Raindance Film Festival – Best Immersive Game 2019) puzzle experience  The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets for multiple VR headsets a couple of months ago. Today, the studio in collaboration with Perp Games has revealed a physical version will be arriving next month for PlayStation VR gamers in Europe.

The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets

Originally revealed during Gamescom in Cologne, Germany last year, the videogame features a heart-warming tale narrated by the players’ grandfather. Each level consists of a floating island which can be spun around to investigate the intricate details and characters within.

As the title suggests, the puzzles involve finding all of the pets hidden within each area, some easily found within structures while others require more elaborate solutions. Additionally, each level has a collection of hidden coins to discover.

Of the announcement, Andreas Juliusson, CMO at Fast Travel Games, says “The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets is a real passion project of ours and has already won the hearts of players as well as critics, recently getting a finalists nomination in the DICE Awards ‘Immersive Reality Game of the Year‘ category! I am delighted to see our heart-warming puzzler now being released on disc for PSVR players in Europe!”

The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets“Seeing Virtual Reality games like The Curious Tale of Stolen Pets win prestigious awards at festivals shows how far the medium has come,” said Rob Edwards, Managing Director at Perp Games. “Fast Travel Games have created one of the most delightful games on PlayStation VR to date and we are absolutely thrilled to be working with them to share the Pets and their adventures with even more people at retail.”

VRFocus found The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets to be a delightful little title even if it was a little short: “The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets is a perfectly pleasant VR experience which features all the polish you’d expect from Fast Travel Games.”

Perp Games and Fast Travel Games will release The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets into European stores on 28th February for PlayStation VR. For the latest updates keep reading VRFocus.

Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency’s Mutators Update Adds Smooth Locomotion

Last month Neat Corporation and Fast Travel Games launched stealth sequel Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency for PC VR headsets. Having received a positive response from players the developers have now dropped the Mutator Update, adding a bunch of options to customise the experience plus one major feature – smooth locomotion.

Budget Cuts 2

Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency’s movement is based around its teleportation gun dubbed the ‘Translocator’, great for moving between surfaces, small gaps and sneakily looking around corners. But it wasn’t great for those action situations where accomplished VR players want to move fluidly, strafing or quickly evading danger. So the introduction of smooth locomotion will be welcomed by many fans.

“Yes, we finally added Smooth Locomotion to Budget Cuts 2! Let’s just say there’s been one or two requests for this…”, Neat Corporation’s Designer Olle Axelsson says in a statement. “This custom setting enables you to move around in a traditional FPS style. You will still find the Translocator useful when moving between surfaces that are unreachable using smooth locomotion movement though. The ‘Mutators Update’ allows players to tweak a variety of mechanics in the game, such as adding Aim Assist when throwing knives or to enable a slow-motion effect that kicks in when you get shot at, and much more.”

Budget Cuts 2

While the new Mutators system will add greater gameplay variety players should be aware some will disable achievements. The full list is as follows:

  • Mutator: Homing knives (aka aim assist)
  • Mutator: Smooth locomotion
  • Mutator: Infinite Stabby Crystals
  • Mutator: Bullet Time
  • Mutator: Paltkoma (triggers slow-mo when eating)
  • Mutator: Gravity modifier
  • Mutator: Enemy aim skill
  • Mutator: Enemy detection speed
  • Mutator: Bullet speed
  • Mutator: NPC animation speed
  • Mutator: NPC health
  • Mutator: Starting equipment
  • Mutator: Guns (guns)
  • Level select (select which level you start a new game from)

The title continues the story from the original Budget Cuts with more TransCorp office mayhem to enjoy. This time however you’re supplied with bow for an added tactical advantage.

Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency supports Oculus Rift/Rift S, HTC Vive and Valve Index, available on Oculus Store and Steam. Currently, there’s a 15% discount available until 27th January, dropping the Steam cost to £20.22 GBP. For all the latest Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency updates, keep reading VRFocus.

Budget Cuts 2 Video Review

Budget Cuts 2 is the conclusion of the adventure that you started in Budget Cuts, but is also a self-contained game and easy to get into. While you were hiding and narrowly escaped certain death in your familiar office environment in the first Budget Cuts, Budget Cuts 2 is all about charging into unknown territory and taking matters into your own hands.

Read the full written review for more details: https://uploadvr.com/budget-cuts-2-mission-insolvency-review

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