Google’s directly competing services aren’t on Vision Pro, but that doesn’t mean the company isn’t doing business on Apple’s headset altogether, as it has now brought two of its most influential VR games to Vision Pro.
Google’s XR studio Owlchemy Labs today launched Job Simulator (2016) and its sequel Vacation Simulator (2019) on Vision Pro, respectively priced at $20 and $30 on the App Store.
The tongue-in-cheek simulator games parody both the worlds of work and play as seen through the eyes of robots who have replaced all human jobs—and have taken human vacations too.
To boot, the franchise has been one of VR’s most successful to date, with both games going multi-platinum across all major VR headsets, and regularly showing up in the top most-popular VR game charts since their respective launches.
The Vision Pro releases of both games are in large part thanks to the studio’s early adoption of hand-tracking, as Apple’s headset doesn’t support motion controllers of any sort. Consequently, this has also allowed the studio to bring a hand-tracking mode to the Quest versions too.
“Owlchemy Labs has always been committed to pioneering hand tracking technology and putting our games on the most innovative platforms,” said Andrew Eiche, CEO at Owlchemy Labs. “Bringing Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator to Apple Vision Pro feels like the most natural manifestation of our goals. The fully immersive environments look stunning on Apple Vision Pro, and the games have been optimized for the hand- and eye-tracking capabilities of the platform.”
Acquired by Google in 2017, Owlchemy Labs is also known for the Emmy-nominated title Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017), and its latest VR game Cosmonious High (2022).
This technically makes for the first Google-owned apps to release on Vision Pro. At the time of this writing, notably missing is YouTube, Google Maps, Meet, Drive, and Photos. The company has said however a YouTube app for Vision Pro is on the map, although it’s not certain when that’s set to arrive.
Owlchemy Labs, the Google-owned VR studio, announced it’s bringing the chart-topping VR games Job Simulator (2016) and its sequel Vacation Simulator (2019) to Apple Vision Pro.
The studio’s seminal ‘Simulator’ franchise has had its fair share of success over the years, with both garnering over a million downloads across all major VR headsets. As testament to its staying power, the studio’s successful job place parody Job Simulator regularly shows up in the top most popular VR game charts since its launch on the original HTC Vive in 2016, with both titles making for great beginner VR experiences since they largely focus on family-friendly, room-scale fun that anyone can easily pick up.
Owlchemy Labs says both games—Job Simulator priced at $20 and Vacation Simulator at $30—will include their respective free content updates when they launch on Vision Pro, which are slated to arrive “soon,” the studio says.
Both games were originally designed around VR motion controllers, which the $3,500 Vision Pro notably lacks, which has put many developers in a pickle as they either seek to adapt their existing VR titles to Apple’s controllerless XR platform, or create a new IP entirely.
That said, it’s safe to assume the studio has adapted both titles to use the headset’s hand-tracking capabilities, which will not only be interesting to see since they’re such object-oriented experiences, but also to watch whether other VR studios follow suit to cater to the new platform that deemphasizes immersive gaming in favor of casual content consumption and productivity apps.
Founded in 2010, and later acquired by Google in 2017, Owlchemy is also known for the Emmy-nominated title Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017), and its latest VR game Cosmonious High (2022). We’re still waiting to see what the studio has in store from its GDC 2022 teaser, which promised to be it’s first-ever VR game built from the ground-up for hand-tracking, and first to feature multiplayer. Whatever the case, it’s clear the studio is continuing its mission to release its most popular VR games on every headset possible.
The most technically impressive VR demo I tried at GDC 2023 felt familiar.
I passed objects back and forth between my hands, tossed them into the air and caught them, twisted dials, grabbed and used spray bottles and typed on a keyboard by pinching one floating letter at a time. I interacted with my squishy surroundings like a toddler at the daycare just like I have for the better part of the last decade in Owlchemy’s Job Simulator on every major VR system, including Vive, Rift, Quest, and PSVR.
The software from Google’s Owlchemy Labs ran on Quest 2. Instead of interacting with tracked controllers, I used Meta’s latest Hand Tracking 2.1 technology with Owlchemy’s fine tuning layered on top. I came out of my demo and asked Andrew Eiche, the new CEO of Owlchemy Labs, if he thinks they’ve achieved the full interaction experience of Job Simulator with only hand tracking.
“I think we got it,” Eiche says. “This demo that we’re giving you here feels a lot like what 2015 HTC Vive at GDC demo was.”
Hand Tracking & Mass Market VR Games
“How do you get a billion people to play VR?” Eiche asks. “The controllers are a barrier. They are built like video game controllers.”
Those words echo those of Eiche late last year, and a bunch of VR gamers reading this are probably tapping away at their keyboards already, enjoying that satisfying haptic feedback as they outline exactly how Eiche is wrong. If that’s you, please take a minute to get to the end of this piece so you can grasp the rest of this glimpse of the future Eiche offered me.
Eiche started at Owlchemy in 2015 and just moved from technical lead to overall lead at a company responsible for some of the highest selling VR games across every single platform they’re on. While Owlchemy’s subsequent games have grown in complexity, adding depth, breadth and new mechanics, it’s still Job Simulator that seems to so often sit on the top sellers lists. Does that path suggest Owlchemy lost its magic touch over ensuing releases?
Given what I saw in this tech demo, I think it would be more useful to suggest a different narrative for Owlchemy’s work. In 2017, Google faced a reality in which Meta planned to invest at least $50 billion over half a decade focused around building a platform for VR games with controller tracking. Google buying Owlchemy allowed the company to spend a fraction of that and task its developers with exploring exactly what the limits of tracked controllers are, while also helping prepare for a much larger opportunity.
“We’re here to talk about hand tracking to kind of plant a flag for the industry to say hand tracking is great, it’s already awesome, and this is the target you should be shooting for,” Eiche said. “You are playing the worst version of our hand tracking that you will play because it’s already better at our studio. It’s gonna be even better a year from now. It’s gonna be better as the cameras that were intended to do primarily spatial tracking also start to understand and be built for hands.”
VR’s Next Software Revolution
Meta’s Chris Pruett made clear in a talk at GDC the company didn’t know what kind of mixed reality games would draw in buyers, and Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney made clear his vision for the metaverse is that “VR goggles….are not required.”
Meanwhile, developers using Moscone’s hallways and hotel rooms in San Francisco demonstrated a future in with VR headsets power a new class of mixed reality gaming experience. Titles like Spatial Ops from Resolution Games and Laser Dance from Thomas Van Bouwel cut across reality in sharp, crisp lines, making use of two or more places at once in ways developers never could before. These demos showed that developers who’ve pushed through VR’s limitations to this moment are poised to surprise a whole generation — and potentially hundreds of millions of people — with VR-powered games.
“If Xbox can sell $129 elite controller, controllers aren’t going anywhere, but…we have to meet the rest of the world where they are,” he told me. “We need to think about the mass market in general. So what [hand tracking is] going to do to VR is it’s…going to further open it up much in the way that the Quest opened it up.”
“VR is in a software problem, not a hardware problem,” Eiche said. “We need to start thinking about pushing further on the software end because the headsets, the next generation, the generation after, are getting good enough, much like the mobile phones did at their time, where it’s a question of can we build it? Not if we can build it…everybody starts from zero. They start with two hands picking things up. And there haven’t been these kind of coalescing of standards…steal our stuff, use our interaction….the future is bright and even with the software stack and the hardware we have now, there’s still so much more uncharted territory. And the other thing, and this is not to take a shot at Tim Sweeney. Tim Sweeney has done genius things that like I could never imagine, but it’s very easy to sound smart and talk shit. It’s very easy. It’s much, much harder to sound smart and actually put the work in to make something succeed.”
From Tomato Presence To Squishy Pills
I tried Owlchemy’s demo twice. The first time I just wanted to assess whether it felt like Job Simulator, and it passed that test with flying colors.
The second time I examined the technical details.
“Tomato presence, when you pick up the object, your hand disappears and is replaced by just the object that exists in Vacation Simulator,” Eiche says about their previous work. “But because hand tracking is so viscerally connected to your hand, unlike holding a controller where you just had this very binary state, pick up or drop, we actually leave the hand visual in and we try to adapt both the hand visual and the object you’re picking up to match.”
Through endless testing and iteration, Owlchemy’s demo shows how they’ve closed the gap between today’s passable hand tracking and satisfying, reliable, interactions. Some of Owlchemy’s core magic here is hidden inside stretchy pills outlining the shape of the hands.
“The tips of your fingers, whether or not you noticed that, your fingers stretched,” Eiche explained. “There’s a large tech art gap between making a bunch of segmented finger things and making some singular cohesive thing. And so we are looking at that from an R&D perspective, but we chose the pills because it works really well.”
I reached toward a dial and pinched together my fingers. Just as I felt the haptic feedback of their touch against one another my pill-fingers seemed to clamp onto the dial. I moved my arm toward my body and watched the furthest pills stretch their connection with the dial before finally snapping away.
“I think your fingers are always gonna stretch a little bit. It’s all in the subtlety of it, right? The thing is you’re grasping at air for lack of a better term. So you don’t have a physical switch to hold onto,” Eiche explains. “So we have to have some acceptable zone which counts as you using the thing. And on the keyboard, if you go back and put your hands there, the keys actually snap to your fingers the opposite way. If you put your fingers near the bubble, they move to your fingers to stay within your hand within a certain area. The letters always show through your hands, so you never block out parts of the keyboard.”
We can’t wait to see the multiplayer hand tracking demo the company is working on still behind closed doors. What I saw at GDC 2023, though, was impressive enough to make me believe more game developers than I expected are going to open VR up wider than Quest’s Touch controllers by simply letting you grasp at air.
“There’s always genres that aren’t perfectly playable, but the funny thing about games is, is that designers are geniuses,” Eiche says. “And they figure out ways to make genres work. You tell me the most competitive shooter and most popular competitive shooter in the world, the majority of players are playing on their phones. Think about that 10 years ago, right? Fortnite? Phones. Call of Duty? Phones, Call of Duty mobile. These are huge, huge games. And they’re playing ’em on a platform that when iPhone [3GS] came out, you would’ve been like, well, it just can’t do shooters.”
Owchemy’s demo made a believer out of me. Google could unleash the company’s insights on the user interface for its follow up to Daydream, or offer frameworks to developers allowing them to start with an impressive set of building blocks for hand tracking. Or Owlchemy could simply just release its hand tracking multiplayer game as an example to others.
Perhaps most importantly, as Eiche explains it, Touch controllers should improve further with hand tracking layered on top.
“It doesn’t preclude any other input system. The craziest thing about hand tracking is it’s going to make controller tracking better because we’ll be able to track your hands while you’re holding the controller,” Eiche said. “And what’s to stop you then from peripherals? Not even having to be smart peripherals. What’s stopping, you know, Ryan at Golf Plus from making a golf club that’s cut off and you hold that to swing, or a paintbrush, instead of having to like figure out how a paintbrush works and you’re a painter, you pick up a real paintbrush cuz why not? And you just tap that into the world and say, all right, this is gonna work. And then you paint.”
Welcome to another VR Job Hub where every weekend gmw3 gathers together vacancies from across the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and now Web3 industries, in locations around the globe to help make finding that ideal job easier. Below is a selection of roles that are currently accepting applications across a number of disciplines, all within departments and companies that focus on immersive entertainment.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there are always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (community@gmw3.com).
We’ll see you next week on gmw3 at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Cosmonious High contains 18 characters across six species all created by a team with zero dedicated animators. That means lots and lots of code to create realistic behaviors and Owlchemy-quality interactivity! The ‘character system’ in Cosmonious High is a group of around 150 scripts that together answer many design and animation problems related to characters. Whether it’s how they move around, look at things, interact with objects, or react to the player, it’s all highly modular and almost completely procedural.
This modularity enabled a team of content designers to create and animate every single line of dialogue in the game, and for the characters to feel alive and engaging even when they weren’t in the middle of a conversation. Here’s how it works.
Guest Article by Sean Flanagan & Emma Atkinson
Cosmonious High is a game from veteran VR studio Owlchemy Labs about attending an alien high school that’s definitely completely free of malfunctions! Sean Flanagan, one of Owlchemy’s Technical Artists, created Cosmonious High’s core character system amongst many other endeavors. Emma Atkinson is part of the Content Engineering team, collectively responsible for implementing every narrative sequence you see and hear throughout the game.
The Code Side
Almost all code in the character system is reusable and shared between all the species. The characters in Cosmonious High are a bit like modular puppets—built with many of the same parts underneath, but with unique art and content on top that individualizes them.
From the very top, the character system code can be broken down into modules and drivers.
Modules
Every character in Cosmonious High gets its behavior from its set of character modules. Each character module is responsible for a specific domain of problems, like moving or talking. In code, this means that each type of Character is defined by the modules we assign to it. Characters are not required to implement each module in the same way, or at all (e.g. the Intercom can’t wave.)
Some of our most frequently used modules were:
CharacterLocomotion – Responsible for locomotion. It specifies the high-level locomotion behavior common to all characters. The actual movement comes from each implementation. All of the ‘grounded’ characters—the Bipid and Flan—use CharacterNavLocomotion, which moves them around on the scene Nav Mesh.
CharacterPersonality – Responsible for how characters react to the player. This module has one foot in content design—its main responsibility is housing the responses characters have when players wave at them, along with any conversation options. It also houses a few ‘auto’ responses common across the cast, like auto receive (catching anything you throw) and auto gaze (returning eye contact).
CharacterEmotion – Keeps track of the character’s current emotion. Other components can add and remove emotion requests from an internal stack.
CharacterVision – Keeps track of the character’s current vision target(s). Other components can add and remove vision requests from an internal stack.
CharacterSpeech – How characters talk. This module interfaces with Seret, our internal dialogue tool, directly to queue and play VO audio clips, including any associated captions. It exposes a few events for VO playback, interruption, completion, etc.
It’s important to note that animation is a separate concern. The Emotion module doesn’t make a character smile, and the Vision module doesn’t turn a character’s head—they just store the character’s current emotion and vision targets. Animation scripts reference these modules and are responsible for transforming their data into a visible performance.
Drivers
The modules that a character uses collectively outline what that character can do, and can even implement that behavior if it is universal enough (such as Speech and Personality.) However, the majority of character behavior is not capturable at such a high level. The dirty work gets handed off to other scripts—collectively known as drivers—which form the real ‘meat’ of the character system.
Despite their more limited focus, drivers are still written to be as reusable as possible. Some of the most important drivers—like CharacterHead and CharacterLimb—invisibly represent some part of a character in a way that is separate from any specific character type. When you grab a character’s head with Telekinesis, have a character throw something, or tell a character to play a mocap clip, those two scripts are doing the actual work of moving and rotating every frame as needed.
Drivers can be loosely divided into logic drivers and animation drivers.
Logic drivers are like head and limb—they don’t do anything visible themselves, but they capture and perform some reusable part of character behavior and expose any important info. Animation drivers reference logic drivers and use their data to create character animation—moving bones, swapping meshes, solving IK, etc.
Animation drivers also tend to be more specific to each character type. For instance, everyone with eyes uses a few instances of CharacterEye (a logic driver), but a Bipid actually animates their eye shader with BipedAnimationEyes, a Flan with FlanAnimationEyes, etc. Splitting the job of ‘an eye’ into two parts like this allows for unique animation per species that is all backed by the same logic.
We chronicle a partial history of one of VR’s best-known developers: Owlchemy Lab.
I’m listening back through an interview with Andrew Eiche and Devin Reimer of Owlchemy Labs and we’re talking about the subtle genius of Half-Life: Alyx’s distance-grab mechanic. It’s part of a 90-minute chat that weaves through the recent history of VR and the wide range of attempts by developers to zero in on products with an audience. Our conversation takes a detour into how Crisis VRigade is secretly one of the purest expressions of the VR shooter and the conversation somehow winds back to their belief that hand-tracking is the next big frontier for VR mass adoption, and others just aren’t seeing it yet.
It’s a fascinating talk and equally insightful to listen back to, but it wasn’t exactly what I meant to discuss. Their studio works to make VR software as immersive, comfortable and accessible as possible at a time when VR hardware is often the opposite. It won them immense success with Job Simulator and their subsequent release have recieved positive reviews from critics and fans, as well as charting in top seller lists (though, notably not as highly as Job Sim). Is that a good showing four games on from the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive?
Owlchemy certainly isn’t out to make VR’s most explosive shooter or epic sword-swinging RPG, with the studio instead focusing its work carefully around existing constraints to craft experiences within current limits. Its been a bit of an experimental research and development lab even while, in recent years, the studio pursued this work operating under the umbrella of one of the world’s largest tech companies. Even today, Job Simulator sits on top sellers lists as one of VR’s most recognized and successful titles, not to mention being followed by multiple successors that each pushed VR design further down this very specific line of thinking.
“We’ve got to remember that today,” Eiche once said to me, “we’re getting more new players into VR than we are getting former players.”
While the studio’s leaders are famously practiced at smiling through questions aimed at uncovering their future plans, looking back at the unique studio’s path and focused design efforts, we can still find hints pointing to Owlchemy and VR’s future.
Owlchemy’s Origins
Owlchemy started in 2010 just when market fatigue and saturation were settling into the mobile gaming market.
“Mobile just kept going downhill and our games were continuously doing better, but we were following that trajectory down,” Reimer says.
They were working on titles like Jack Lumber which, as Reimer explained it, is all about being “a supernatural lumberjack out for vengeance on the forest because the evil tree killed his granny.” While the slapstick humor in their work continues today, gone are the days of keeping the lights on by developing for dozens of platforms fueld by hardware maker partnerships, like a specific port for a Blackberry phone that Eiche says “maybe a hundred humans ever bought” and an HP laptop with a Leap Motion hand-tracking sensor built into it.
“That’s how we survived,” Reimer says.”When people talk about like startup companies and stuff like that, they always like paint over it as this like perfect genesis…That’s always the way that it works, but that’s not the way that real companies ever start.”
The company attempted an approach where they would pursue a project under contract for someone else and then return to their own intellectual property. They even did a Kickstarter for a game called Dyscourse, to which Reimer says they learned to “never, ever” do crowdfunding again. They also started giving talks about surviving in the harsh wilderness that is indie development.
In retrospect, this period didn’t just help them survive, it also helped prepare for VR’s multi-platform consumer origins on console, PCs, and phones.
“It was like: ‘We’ve been training for this our whole lives,’” Reimer says.
Still, like any skeptical developer protecting their time, when the Oculus Rift’s Kickstarter launched in 2012 Reimer says he made a list – specifically, a list about why VR would fail. Or fail again, even. He blocked out a week of his time for the investigation and got started.
“It was like ‘headsets are too heavy on the head,'” he recalls. “Okay, mobile phones are starting to solve some of that. ‘The optics are bad.’ There are [now] advances in optics. And I went through that list and then I ended up calling Alex [Schwartz, Owlchemy co-founder] and I was like ‘This is going to happen. This is going to happen this time.'”
The studio started with a vehicle for its earliest tests being one of Owlchemy’s contract jobs, a superheroic jumping game called Aaaaa! for the Awesome!, in which you…jumped. You jumped very high, in fact. And then you fell.
“It was early days for VR,” Reimer recalls. “It’s first person. It’s just falling. I think this could work in VR.”
Owlchemy pitched a VR version, openly admitting it wouldn’t make money and that this was only for research purposes.
“It took us two days to get it up and running and then an entire month to make it not suck,” Reimer says.
Owlchemy had to figure out not only how to get a game running in VR for the first time but also some of the things we now take for granted, like VR menus and how to make it playable end-to-end without asking users to leave a headset. Owlchemy fumbled around just enough to release its work on Oculus Share, the now-extinct portal for early VR experiments and experiences.The reaction to the game was positive enough to get Owlchemy noticed. Not just by the VR enthusiasts checking for new experiences on a daily basis, but also by the companies busily plotting the next stages for consumer VR.
A Job Offer From Valve
By early 2014, VR was gaining steam.
Two years prior, the Oculus Rift had become one of the most talked-about Kickstarter projects of all time, raising nearly $2.5 million. ~$350 DK1 headsets were adding countless more loops of cables to developer studies and enthusiasts were sampling the first PC VR content via Oculus Share. But, slowly but surely, it was becoming clear Oculus wouldn’t be the only name in VR.
“Valve had been working on some of this early prototype stuff, and we knew a little bit of what they were working on and they decided to do the Steam Dev Days and they were gonna show a bunch of VR,” Reimer says.
Owlchemy was invited to host one of three talks on VR that February, the others being handled by Luckey and Michael Abrash, then of Valve and now heading research at Meta’s Reality Labs. From that, Reimer and colleagues were treated to Valve’s fabled VR room demo, which featured a crude VR headset that was positionally tracked using dozens of markers plastered all over a room. There were no controllers and the headset was incredibly bulky, but it represented the next step toward immersive consumer VR over the DK1, which could only track the direction of your gaze and not the position of your head.
You’ve probably heard at least one major VR figurehead describe that demo as a lightbulb moment for VR. Reimer isn’t one of them.
“I came out of that demo so depressed,” he says. “Because I realized that this is where VR was going and I could not see how in the short term we could bridge the gap on the technology side. We had this whole giant tracking problem that was like, how are we ever going to solve this in the short term? And then also what’s the input side of this equation? That is a whole other thing.”
Despite the reservations, Owlchemy pushed on with its next VR project. The Oculus Rift DK2 was on the horizon and would introduce its own positional tracking, albeit in a limited fashion with a camera facing you.
“We like sat down and started building all these pitches and we hated them all,” Reimer says. “Why don’t we like anything that we’re building? This should clearly be the future.”
Then the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.
Owlchemy was again treated to a new demo from Valve, this time for a device it was building with HTC. It represented yet another major step for VR, this time introducing fully-tracked controllers – and Valve wanted Owlchemy to build something for it.
“They were like: ‘We’ve made two. You can have one.'”
“We were like: ‘Cool.'”
And so the headset — along with the rest of Owlchemy — went to Reimer in Winnepeg, Canada. Or at at least most of it did; some parts of the setup they had to 3D print themselves.
“Valve at the time had the most 3D printers per capita or some crazy statistic,” Eiche points out. “And so they just sent us an STL file and it was like… what are we supposed to do with it?”
So they figured that bit out, and how to stitch it all together, and how to use the controllers with two USB wires. They then had a week to build a demo in what Reimer describes as the “most pivitol” seven days in the history of the company.
“The four of us just sat in my basement and programmed and drank and played video games for a week straight without sleeping. And Job Simulator is what popped up the other end of that thing,” he said. “The first thing we built was this little table with cubes on it.”
He put it low enough on the ground so he could sit on the floor and spent the next 20 minutes stacking cubes. He then removed the headset and made a proclamation about where VR was going:
“It’s physics!” he said.
Back To Job
By “physics”, Reimer meant a sense of agency unlike anything else felt in a virtual world before.
With two motion controllers reaching into environments there were direct consequences for your physical actions. What’s one of the most common places where your physical actions can have interesting consequences? Jobs, of course. And so Owlchemy started prototyping different jobs.
Reimer notes it was often “extreme things” that the team expected to be incredibly fun in VR. But the extremes didn’t always work. Things like juggling weren’t as compelling as the team thought they might be, whilst ideas like window washing ended up being incredibly uncomfortable to experience.
“We ended up having this kitchen […] and it was interesting because immediately it was like: ‘I understand what I need to do,'” Reimer explains.
“And that was another big learning was that, early in VR, there was this tendency to be like ‘I can do anything, it’s all virtual, so just whatever.’ And what we learned was that by leveraging people’s previous experience, you can side hop so much of the tutorialization or learning or anything like that. And then let people just do what they want into the world.”
The more it honed in on this idea, the more Owlchemy started to see its work validated. Reimer recalls one player putting an egg down, noticing it start to roll off the side of the table and then instinctively catching it. “All of a sudden it clicked,” he says. “This is probably one of the most complex human computer interactions that has ever taken place. It was such low, low lizard brain of solving this entire complex loop. But it just happened because we could leverage so much of what humans are good at to begin with.”
It’s around now that Eiche came onboard, having worked on some VR for a consultancy firm (he recalls one demo to a senior partner who proclaimed: “I wouldn’t be caught dead with that s**t on my face.”)
Full development on Job Simulator took place in a rented house in Austin, Texas. Reimer and Eiche recall a house full of VR developers and equipment chipping away at what made the game tick. This was not exactly a safe process. Reimer wrote on Twitter recently about prototype controllers that would give him electric shocks and making the house sound a little like a testing field for VR crash dummies.
“I’ve never had a controller that made me bleed and gave me high voltage shocks as much as that one,” he says. “I winced when I went to grab it.”
For a developer obsessed with VR comfort and safety, its notable one particularly treacherous area at the office was the loft.
“At the time you could only make square [VR] spaces because it was so early,” Eiche explains. “You couldn’t do polygons or anything like we do now. And part of the loft extended out over an open balcony, like over the second floor. So it’d be like, ‘Hey, if you feel the banister hitting, just don’t lean too far. It’s a one story drop on two other developers.'”
Owlchemy’s leaders were starting to feel pretty confident about where they had gotten with Job Simulator. The game was shaping up to be one of the best examples of what separated VR from flastscreen media and it would appear in the launch window for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PSVR. But, come release, the developers realized even the most optimistic projections for their own work had been modest.
“In my wildest dreams, I never could have imagined the reach of that game,” Reimer says.
This, it turns out, was something of a paradox. Job Simualtor has indeed been fantastically successful, still topping charts today. But consumer VR — at the time — was not. It’s usually this point in a developer retrospective that I’d tell you how the studio in question weathered the coming storm as VR’s install base limped out of the gates in the face of high prices and complicated setups. But Job Simulator’s continued success — it still ranks in the top 10 selling PSVR games on a monthly basis six years on — makes Owlchemy an oddity in the VR space.
Owlchemy’s leaders attribute success only partially to those sales, but also to their pacing and refusal to undergo explosive growth as investment in VR reached dramatic highs. Should they have gone and made a flatscreen PC game after Job Simulator? A mobile phone game? Heck, the controller grips resemble the grip of a gun and its one of gaming’s most popular genres, they could’ve gone the route Stress Level Zero went down and honed first-person shooter mechanics in VR.
“Everything is risky, right?” Reimer explains. “[So] why not bet on the thing where we can see this trend line? We don’t know how long it’s gonna take for this trend line to find success. But PC is going to get harder. Mobile’s going to get harder. This one is on the other trajectory. And so we can build something where we’re scaling with it.”
As far as the prospect of a shooter game goes, Eiche has some thoughts.
“Aiming is actually incredibly difficult and most people don’t realize like shooting sports are an Olympic sport,” Eiche explains. “So it’s an actual difficult thing. And one of my favorite things to watch is people who are really good at first person shooters try to play shooting games in VR because they’re not good.”
Just because you’re good at something on a gamepad, doesn’t mean you’re good at it in VR and while shooters are a popular form of videogame, Owlchemy sees VR as reaching much wider than that.
“The two things that we like really focused on there was can we build something that works for anybody? Anybody can pick up and play and have a good time,” Eiche says. “And also an important point of that is to not make people sick. Because the VR of that era, damn near a hundred percent of the titles you play would make you sick…assuming your users have all this back knowledge [on sickness] is just not a good way to build human computer interactions.”
From Rick & Morty To Google
Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-Ality was something of a continutation of Owlchemy’s alternating development cycle – something original followed by something under contract.
Early on, they had no idea if Job Simulator would take off, let alone the wider VR market, and the deal with Adult Swim Games to make Virtual Rick-ality gave them a security that, as it turns out, they wouldn’t end up needing.
“Essentially for us, it was the thing that was going to make sure that, if the previous game wasn’t successful, we can continue to make the next original thing,” Reimer says. “And so from a strictly business and financial standpoint, Job Simulator ended up being that thing. It gave us the confidence to be able to not worry about that success.”
That’s not to say there’s any regret about working on Rick & Morty. It’s an enormously popular property, for one thing, and it enabled Owlchemy to build out yet more tools and learn more lessons it could take into future projects.
“That was very in our minds with Rick & Morty,” Reimer says. “What cool stuff can we build that’s going to make this awesome game, but also will allow us to R&D and also build these things that we can utilize after?”
“It allowed us to break out of Job Sim for a little bit,” Eiche adds, “and do something fun. Originally we did bots [in Job Sim] because we didn’t want to have bipedal characters. So that helped. A lot of what you see in Cosmonious High today are lessons that we had learned in Rick & Morty, like we had to high five a character, and that was impossible back in the day. Now every character can be high-fived at any time in Cosmonious. I know that sounds like such a silly small thing, but you high-five Rick and that broke so many times. We had to put so many patches out to fix it.”
It also gave Owlchemy the opportunity to work on some more traditional game elements like implementing voice acting and performance work.
“We got to try a lot of different things in that IP that ended up being kind of case studies on how to, and how not to do things going forward,” Reimer adds.
Development for Rick & Morty also took place during that cold VR winter, years before the release of the Quest headset. But as the industry reckoned with what type of content was going to help VR take off and more shooters and traditional gaming genres started to enter the scene, Owlchemy noticed a curious lack of Job Simulator imitators.
“Let’s say, hypothetically, you build a word guessing game,” Eiche suggests. “Then a million clones appear. And there’s all sorts of reasons why our game is a little too complex to clone, but […] we actually assumed many times that ‘Okay, we’re going to release Job Sim — once we realized it was going to be big — we’re going to see a lot of bright and colorful games with hands and kind of adventure style-y and performative like our games are.’ And then we’re like ‘Hey, nobody’s doing that. Okay, we’ll release Rick & Morty.'”
“I was starting to get to the point of paranoia right before launch,” Reimer adds. “Everyone’s loving this. Everyone’s going to want to do this. And at the time I just didn’t give us, being so inside that bubble, enough credit of the complexity of what we had pulled off.”
Job Simulator’s success had eliminated the anxiety of surviving from game to game. But it also made the developer a very lucrative target for acquisitions, and that’s exactly what happened. In May 2017, a month after the launch of Rick & Morty, Google announced its intention to acquire Owlchemy, long before Meta had started buying up VR development teams.
“We had this unique situation where our worlds were aligning,” Reimer says of the move. “We had kept pushing on VR for everyone and Google was like ‘Yes, that’s how we’re successful, when VR can be for everyone.'”
Interestingly, Owlchemy never did the things you’d expect a content studio to do when it gets bought by a giant corporation. It hasn’t made exclusive titles for Google platforms, for example, and it hasn’t avoided other platforms as a result. In fact, even if the team did want to do something exclusive to Google it’d be tough. After all, the company pulled out of VR hardware and services years ago after failing to get the Daydream mobile platform to take off.
Isn’t it a bit strange for a company that doesn’t make games and doesn’t provide any VR services or hardware to own a VR game developer? Reimer says the continued success of Owlchemy’s titles means that relationship hasn’t felt under threat.
“They wanted to set things up was to be this wholly-owned subsidiary,” he explains. “At Google, we don’t make games internally, this is not something we’re good at.”
Google’s leadership recognized, instead, that Owlchemy is good at releasing VR games to platforms with tracked hands.
“Let’s let you do that,” Reimer explained of Google’s direction to them.
The Quest In Lieu Of A Daydream
It’s at this point my coversation with Reimer and Eiche stopped being so much documentative as it was philosophical. A hit title under your belt and an acquisition by one of the world’s biggest technology companies sort of takes the wind out of the scrappy indie narrative, and both Vacation Simulator and Cosmonious High are still fresh in everyone’s memory.
Vacation Sim was the studio’s first shot at a sequel, and looked to further expand Owlchemy’s understanding of interaction and exploration. Last month’s release of Cosmonious High, meanwhile, returned to a lot of the character work first established in Rick & Morty, and was also Owlchemy’s first game to allow for free teleportation to explore any part of a map.
Perhaps what was most interesting about the development of each, however, was that Owlchemy had to work out how to get them — along with Job Simulator — on standalone hardware.
“Oculus runs a lot of experiments,” Eiche recalls of learning about the Quest for the first time. “So to be perfectly honest, we were like ‘Oh, this is another experiment. That’s going to be very expensive. It’s great. We’re really happy that they’re pushing in this direction because we think that’s what [VR] is going to be.’ But I think Devin even said we’re still five years out, this is just them monkeying around with some experiment.”
Reimer specifically believed 6DOF tracking on a mobile headset within this timeframe was a pretty unrealistic expectation. But, once Owlchemy had a clearer view of where Meta (then Facebook) was heading with Quest, it knew it had to change gear. The pair wanted Job Simulator on Quest as soon as possible and at the same level of fidelity you could experience on other platforms. No small order, as any Quest developer will tell you, but the developer’s work porting to PSVR in the past helped them cram it in, with Vacation Simulator following soon after.
Cosmonious, as I learned in an interview last month, was another tricky task. In fact, the team nearly cut the paint system it had implemented into the game. Nonetheless, all three of Owlchemy’s original games are now running on Quest and ready to introduce new players to VR.
So, where does Owlchemy go from here?
The Future
“The next thing that we’re seeing going forward is hand tracking,” Reimer says with confidence. “We are all-in on that. I’m treating it very much like the early days when we were like, ‘No, Job Simulator is going to be two tracked controllers’ and some platforms that I will not name said, ‘No, that’s got to work with a [gamepad] controller.'”
This is a bullish perspective on a method of input that’s still finding its, well, hands. Still, big advances in hand tracking are being made seemingly by the month; Meta just updated its hand tracking solution on Quest 2 and its Project Cambria headset could stand to improve things further still. Reimer and Eiche, meanwhile, aren’t ready to confirm that their next game will be hand tracking-only just yet (the pair say they’re still in R&D for what’s next), but the Owlchemy team already uses the technology in its own workflows. If it does go in that direction then they’ll be figuring out what’s best for the control scheme all over again.
“We’re not going to do karate Beat Saber,” Eiche jokes.
But what about the haptics of physical controller buttons?
“There’s always going to be a place for controls, right?” Reimer replies. “Because just there’s always a place for kind of the flat games, there’s always going to be a group. We still use a mouse. We have touch screens and I’m sitting in front of two monitors and still typing on a keyboard and a mouse. So that’s not going away, but I think what we’re trying to focus on is like the extreme mainstream adoption area.”
“We need to continue to engage the mass [market]. To make sure this stuff is working for everyone. Because we are all going to be using VR at some point here in the not too distant future.”
Job Simulator, Rick and Morty: Virtual-Rickality, Vacation Simulator, what do all these virtual reality (VR) videogames have in common? Well, Owlchemy Labs for one but the other is the child-like gameplay that each one has. Like a five-year-old trying to lend a hand when you’re baking, all they want to do is get their hands in the bowl and squidge batter through their fingers (or fling flour around the place). That’s the essence of Cosmonious High, hands-on fun-filled VR with all sorts of hidden delights.
To say that Cosmonious High is aesthetically in your face is an understatement, it’s visually the most striking VR title Owlchemy Labs has ever created. Apart from the very odd black item here and there, the pallet range is entirely in the vivid spectrum with lashings of light blues, oranges, reds, yellows and so many more. This flamboyant colour range makes even more sense as you get further into the videogame mixing up all sorts of liquids to create new concoctions as well as unleashing your inner painter.
Cosmonious High is built around the premise that you’re the new kid, who’s crash-landed into the school on your first day. This being an interstellar school you’re a very special alien, one who can gain abilities as required at a critical time. So when things start to go a little haywire in class (and they will) you’ll suddenly gain a new skill that can be shot from your hands. Unleash a fountain of water, for example, set things on fire, freeze them if you so please or why not make an item tiny or huge. There are eight abilities to discover all of which have their practical uses around the school.
This being an Owlchemy Lab’s title there’s plenty to do. Not only do you have classes to attend – where those new abilities are unlocked – but there are extra credit challenges to complete, students to help, random blobs to find and a school to fix. Yes, the school is falling apart so you need to put out fires, plug leaks and fix electrical systems to get things back in order; essentially busywork.
Those credits are how you unlock more of Cosmonious High, where you’ll find chemistry labs, the art school, astronomy, the sports hall and more; all your usual school stuff. If you’ve played any of the aforementioned videogames then you’ll know almost everything is interactive in some way. Even down to the smallest of details where particular substances interact with one another showcases the level of technical achievement that’s gone into this seemingly childish game.
Take water for example. This is the very first ability you can use, firing jets out your palms to extinguish flames. Find the paint pot and dip your hands in, you can now literally paint any surface in a multitude of colours that’ll blend on their own. Want rid, switch back to water and you can clean up, watching the liquid run down the walls is such an impressive feat considering this is all on Quest 2.
I was also happy to see Owlchemy Labs improve the ability selection function from my initial preview. Previously it was really fiddly to press the back of my hand to activate the selection wheel. Now, no such issue, easily being able to alternate powers on each hand without worrying about smacking the controllers together.
There are a lot of other good ideas employed in Cosmonious High that aid user interaction. Simple things from waving at characters to draw their attention and start a conversation. You can’t talk but you can pull a speech bubble from your mouth with a bunch of what are essentially emojis, where you can encourage a talking point or express how you feel about a particular question posed. This extends to accessibility as well, you can play seated or standing, flicking a switch in your backpack to activate the shorter mode. Or the fact that the only locomotion system is teleportation and snap rotation, making for a very comfortable experience that’s very light on options.
And that’s kind of where Cosmonious High begins to lose its sparkle, particularly if you’re a more experienced player. I’m all for as many accessibility and comfort options as a developer can squeeze in, however, I’ve got to a point – as I’m sure many of you have – in my VR gaming experience where I find teleportation immersion-breaking and just too damn finicky when all I want is to walk around. It feels antiquated to only have this option and gives the impression that the aim is to cater for new players only.
This also seems to be the case in the fact that Cosmonious High offers no challenge whatsoever. Without breaking a sweat you’ll probably be through the main campaign in around five hours, and as mentioned, there’s plenty to keep your hands busy solving little puzzles here and there. Yet it gives the impression of a puzzle game without any truly solid puzzles. Almost as if Owlchemy wants to cater to the pre-teen market when Meta itself doesn’t advise children under 13 using the headset.
Cosmonious High is Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory in VR, with a myriad assortment of sounds, colours and stuff to stick your finger in. It’s technically solid as I’d expect from a developer so well versed in VR with diverse characters and a deep, organic sandbox world to be entertained by. But it sticks to a very well-oiled system of simple task completion with the complexity never raising high enough to satisfy mature VR players. Cosmonious High provides just the right flavour of gameplay for younger players or those new to the VR scene looking to learn how interactive these titles can be. If you played Job Simulator at the original launch then you may want to look elsewhere.
Google’s VR studio Owlchemy Labs is back with its signature ‘play with everything’ approach to VR in Cosmonious High. As a student in an alien high school you’ll discover a bevy of fun powers and objects to play with. After graduating from Vacation Simulator, does the studio’s next game get a perfect grade? Find out in our full review of Cosmonious High.
Cosmonious High Details:
Available On: Quest 2 (not on Quest 1), SteamVR Release Date: March 31st, 2022 Developer: Owlchemy Labs Reviewed On: Quest 2
Gameplay
Although the game diverges in setting and structure from Owlchemy Labs’ prior games—Job Simulator (2016) & Vacation Simulator (2019)—Cosmonious High shares lots in common with the Simulator series. In particular, Cosmonious High is densely packed with all kinds of interactive items that cohesively respond to the rules laid out in the world, creating a canvas for experimentation.
In Cosmonious High you take on the role of a Prismi, a novel alien creature which can manifest various powers—like the ability to shoot water, wind, or fire from you hands. The entire game takes place on your first day of school where things go a bit awry and it’s up to you to fix them.
Beyond just fixing what’s broken, you’ll step into unique classrooms where you’ll learn how the world works, complete assignments, and acquire new powers as you go. Throughout, you’ll be prompted to experiment with the rules of the world and the items around you.
Through ‘assignments’ in each classroom you’ll interact with the game’s tight-knit cast of alien characters and complete various tasks to the satisfaction of your teachers.
Take Chemosophy class, for instance, where players mix and heat various liquids to discover new compounds which do interesting things. Bouncium, for example, can be poured on pretty much any object in the game to make it bouncy. Same goes for Stickium, which causes items to clump together into a big sticky ball. And from there the game encourages you to continue experimenting and exploring by combining different compounds to see what else you can come up with.
And that’s the essence of Cosmonious High—experimenting with the rules of the world to see what what happens. You’ll need some natural curiosity to get the most out of the game.
And the fun part is that something almost always happens. The depth of interactions on display between the player and the world (including the characters), goes far beyond what’s seen anywhere else in VR.
Your powers, for instance, seem to interact with nearly everything. You can use your water spray to push items around or wash them off after painting them. You can use your ice power to freeze objects and then use your fire power to melt them. At one point you’ll get a ‘thought reading’ power which allows you to target pretty much anyone or anything in the entire game and you’ll get a thought bubble which tells you what it’s thinking.
The world of Cosmonious High is very good about letting the player do things that seem logical given the established rules. For instance, I came across a small puzzle which required that I light a fuse on fire. At this point in the game I hadn’t acquired the fire power, however I had smuggled a Bunsen burner out of Chemosophy (by stashing it in my backpack); to my delight, the game let me use the Bunsen burner to light the fuse and complete the power, rather than making me wait to get the fire power later in the game.
But Cosmonious High’s gameplay almost never rises above ‘guided sandbox’. You’re given a world full of interesting items and logical mechanics, but what you’re asked to do with them is really never that fun or challenging. There’s rarely a satisfying climax where you put everything you’ve learned to the test—a strange choice for a game designed around a ‘school’—or where all the mechanics come together in ways that make them feel especially synergistic. For the most part you’re just listening to simple instructions and interacting with the game’s characters.
While the game’s characters are well designed, differentiated, and as interactive as the rest of the environment, their overtly chipper attitude and banal conflicts really feel like the kind of thing you’d find in a kids show.
In fact, Cosmonious High overall feels like a game designed for children. The world as portrayed feels like a pre-teen’s notion of what a fantasy high school could be like. And while there’s no problem with games for kids, it’s an odd audience to target considering the game’s key platform, Quest 2, is explicitly for kids 13 and older. When I imagine an actual high-schooler playing Cosmonious High I envision a lot of eye rolling.
And I think it’s important to here to make the distinction between ‘family friendly’ and ‘made for children’. I’d call a movie like Finding Nemo ‘family friendly’; while it’s appropriate for kids, adults can enjoy it just as well. Cosmonious High, on the other hand, feels more ‘made for children’ than not—more so than the ‘family friendly’ Job Simulator & Vacation Simulator.
For me (since I’m not… ya know, 13) this is a shame because Cosmonious High is a brilliant game from a technical standpoint. It’s visually sharp with excellent art direction, voice acting, character designs, interactivity, affordances, and ridiculous attention to detail. And it runs great on Quest 2, even with a heavy emphasis on heaps of physics items. It’s really just missing more solid gameplay to support the sandbox and task-completion elements, while being relatable to a more general audience.
It took me around six hours to complete Cosmonious High, having done about 80% of the game’s optional content. Optional content comes largely in the form of collectibles and optional tasks. There’s trading cards to find, broken lights & pipes to fix, stamps to collect, and Blebs to discover.
Blebs are downright adorable spherical critters that you can find throughout the school. For as damn cute as they are, I was sad to find they didn’t really serve any purpose other than being unbearably endearing.
Immersion
Image courtesy Owlchemy Labs
Cosmonious High is full of rich interactivity the likes of which is rarely seen elsewhere in VR. Rather than traveling across distant but sparse lands, the game packs a smaller area to the brim with things to touch, see, and play with. Food can be eaten, containers can be filled with liquid, paint can coat surfaces, instruments can be played… in multiple ways.
At one point in Chemosophy class, I learned how to make the game’s version of coffee, which then allowed me to dispense it from a machine that could dispense any of the compounds I’d discovered so far. After filling a beaker with it I wondered if I could simply lean down and drink it straight from the spout. Sure enough I could! Just one of a thousand little interactive details the folks at Owlchemy had the foresight to include.
Interactivity really is the name of the game; if it looks like you can touch it, you almost certainly can.
And it isn’t just the items. Characters are charmingly reactive too. Spray water at them and they’ll spit it back at you. Try to freeze them and they’ll react physically and with dialogue. Throw something to them and they’ll catch it. You can even give them a first bump or a high-five.
You can also talk to characters in a simple but effective way. When you approach one, reach for your mouth and you’ll pull out a bubble filled with icons representing your dialogue choices.
And what school is complete without a backpack? Reach behind you and pull out your backpack which conveniently stores your inventory, lists of collectibles, and even a camera which you can use to take in-game pictures (which also enter into gameplay). The backpack also lets you store items to take them between locations.
Cosmonious High uses a Half-Life: Alyx-like force pull system where you can target distant objects with your outstretched hand, grip to select, then pull to launch the object into your hand. It doesn’t feel quite as refined as the Alyx implementation, but it works pretty darn well and it remains my favorite variation of force-pull to date.
Comfort
Image courtesy Owlchemy Labs
Cosmonious High supports only teleport movement and snap-turning and is exceptionally considerate of comfort throughout. I can’t recall a single moment during gameplay where the game itself did anything that made me feel dizzy or disoriented. While this is a bummer for the ‘only smooth movement’ crowd, moving itself isn’t a huge part of the gameplay (most of the time you’re at a station doing things with your hands), so this might not be as detrimental to the experience as you might think.
The game has no qualms about letting you push things beyond the performance limit on Quest 2 which can seriously tank the framerate to unplayable (and uncomfortable levels).
While nothing in the game that I was ever prompted to do would reach that point, those with some patience can easily spawn more objects than the game can reasonably handle.
Luckily there’s plenty of trash cans spread throughout which you can use to demolish any performance-hogging creations and get right back up to speed.
Cosmonious High’ Comfort Settings – March 31st, 2022
Turning
Artificial turning
Smooth-turn
Snap-turn
Adjustable increments
Movement
Artificial movement
Smooth-move
Teleport-move
Blinders
Posture
Standing mode
Seated mode
Artificial crouch
Real crouch
Accessibility
Subtitles
Languages
English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean
We’ve got an exclusive look at some of the powers of Owlchemy Labs’ new VR game, Cosmonious High.
In the studio’s follow-up to Vacation Simulator, you play as the newest student at an alien school, and discover the ability to summon elements and other powers as you go about completing classes. Get a look at just some of the abilities waiting for you in the game below.
Cosmonious High Powers Trailer Revealed
The trailer shows some of the first powers you’ll get, like water that not only lets you put out fires but can even be mixed with chemicals and elements to shoot world-altering jets of liquid or paint to redecorate rooms. Crystal, meanwhile, can be used to draw in 3D space a little like Tilt Brush, whilst ice can be combined with water to fire ice cubes. Beyond that, we get a look at telekinesis and resize, the latter of which really lets you cause havoc.
These aren’t the only powers you’ll find in the final game, of course, though Owlchemy is being coy on what other abilities you’ll be able to discover.
We recently went hands-on with the game’s opening hour, which we certainly enjoyed though were left eager to see how the game opens up once you get more powers and unlock new classes. Last week we also sat down with the Owlchemy team to discuss designing Cosmonious High, detailing new interactions and technical hurdles that the team faced. Cosmonious High itself launches on March 31 on Quest 2 and PC VR.
Which powers are you looking forward to using in Cosmonious High? Let us know in the comments below!
It’s six years into the launch of consumer VR and, in that time, the team has put out three games with its fourth, Cosmonious High, just a few weeks away. Like Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality before it, Cosmonious is a typically light-hearted showcase of new immersive design ideas and concepts that refuses to adhere to some of the trends that have arisen in other games in the VR landscape in recent years. These are trends that tend to fast-track more traditional gaming concepts like fast movement, which might cater to hardcore, long-time VR gamers, but risk leaving the wider, more casual and first-time audience nauseated.
“We’ve got to remember that today we’re getting more new players into VR than we are getting former players,” says Andrew Eiche Chief Technology Owl (not a typo, it’s a thing they do). “This game is one of our most complex games […] I’m not saying we’re making it for absolutely the greenest players. We still can’t forego that, like, maybe somebody playing Cosmonious High has played Beat Saber and Job Simulator and this is the third game they played. Or maybe it’s the first, but we’re really focused on that.”
“The way we think about things is there’s stuff for everybody,” Devin Reimer, Chief Executive Owl (still not a typo) later adds. “And if somebody comes into VR and they just play our games in order, they’re actually going to have a great onboarding experience to VR in general. And so instead of us building games that are trying to compete with other games that we have made, here’s just like a really awesome onboarding ramp to what VR has to offer.”
Cosmonious might be seen as the culmination of all of Owlchemy’s work thus far. Job Simulator introduced you to VR interactivity, Rick and Morty explored VR characters, Vacation Simulator fleshed out bigger, more varied worlds, and Cosmonious now revisits each of those core tenets, expanding upon them. “Cosmonious High is now more about cross-interactivity in the world and looking at building this much more open environment as well as having deeper character interactions,” Eiche says.
The game’s origins date back to the development of the original Job Simulator, which the pair reveal very nearly had a fifth job in the form of a teacher mode. “We were right on the cusp of putting it in Job Simulator and ran out of time,” Eiche says. “It was probably one of the most fully realized things. And then we were like, ‘Eh, it’s just not going to make it.'”
After shipping Vacation Simulator in 2019, the team knew it wanted to revisit the idea of school and the new concepts it might introduce. Specifically, the studio was interested in the idea of friends and how to communicate with them. To that end, Cosmonious has a conversation system that’s given the expected Owlchemy spin. Instead of lines of dialogue to read and then select, you simply choose a response from a series of emojis. “We wanted a system where you felt expressive,” Eiche explains. “So in our case, emojis are the language that many of us use today to speak, so we understand what those mean, but also that didn’t feel prescriptive.”
In order to have meaningful conversations, though, you’ve got to have believable characters. Traditional techniques like scripted mocap and canned animations, Reimer believes, haven’t served VR very well thus far. It feels as if you’re “in a museum exhibit where there’s…an animatronic,” he says. “And it’s not that the mocap is bad. It’s just in real life, people play off of you, right? Their head tilts towards you. When you gesture towards them, they interact. It’s not this boxed unit that plays the same every time. And so that was super important when we started working on these characters was to build out all these systems that allowed them to be dynamic.”
Cosmonious’ cast of students, then, are wide-eyed critters conveniently missing tricky animation points like, y’know, elbows. They’re made up of a complex set of layers to determine their responses to you and your actions. Eiche explains that they have members of the Owlchemy team go in to act out lines of dialogue “like puppetry”, with Owlchemy’s tech then interpreting how it should also shift in the given context.
“It allows for this really cool emergent stuff,” Reimer says. “Like the other day I was playing and Fren, one of the alien characters, was in Chemistry and went and grabbed a glass and then put it under the tap to fill it up with water. And then I toss something and then [she] caught it with the other hand and looked at it while still holding the glass […] The amount of systems that played together to make that piece of like performance art is pretty incredible, but it just feels so natural.”
But characters are only one part of Cosmonious High’s makeup. The more immediate part of the game is your character’s ability to summon supernatural powers, like shooting water or ice, and then applying them to lessons and tasks that make up short, approachable objectives a little like the ones seen in Vacation Simulator. I said in my preview last week that there was a promising start to be seen with these powers in the game’s opening 30 minutes, but was waiting for it to really open up and let me start putting it through its paces to see what the system could do.
Eiche says that will happen as you unlock new abilities — lighting and command of mechanical wasps were just revealed — and start looking to combine powers. “I think that’s really where a lot of the interesting things start happening is when you get this where you’re like, okay, what happens if I mixed the ice power and the water power? Oh, it shoots ice cubes. That’s really cool. And then, how can I use this in a different way?”
This, Reimer says, also highlights the emergent side of gameplay. One developer was “shooting water and they’re shooting ice,” he recalls. “So then the water streamed frozen ice cubes, but the water in their hand was actually a fluid that makes things edible. So then the ice cubes were edible and they bounced on the floor. And then our little alien Blebs bounced around and they’re like, “Ooh, food!” And they’re chomping on it and it’s just it’s all of those systems just playing together.”
And, sure enough, I find some off-the-cuff fun in spraying fellow classmates with water (which they instantly gurgle) or drawing hats on them with the Tilt Brush-like crystal power. But this level of freedom does open Cosmonious up to a less desired avenue: bullying the virtual characters. How does Owlchemy approach that?
“It’s best to leave it alone,” Eiche replies. “So this goes all the way back to Rick and Morty. We’ve had this exact debate. And what we found is best is to acknowledge things as funny. Our games are inherently nonviolent, right? So we’re already off to a good start. You don’t have the whole like, ‘Oh, I only have guns for hands, let me shoot every NPC’ problem that you get in a lot of other games.'”
“We have two choices, we could defuse and have some fun with it, or we can ignore. We pretty much just pick one of the two based on what works better. So the gurgling sound is like a defuse. It’s funny, they got it. They’re drinking the water, thanks, we’re good. And then if they’re hitting them, if you’re trying to hit them really hard, they’re just not reacting because any reaction at all is encouragement. That’s the point of trolling, right? The whole concept of trolling is that you are seeking a negative. So just no reaction is ‘Oh, the game’s not gonna play with me in that space, so I’m just not going to go there.'”
As alluded to above, another area Owlchemy is steering clear of is smooth locomotion. In six years of big releases, none of Owlchemy’s games have used this feature, instead relying on room-scale movement or teleportation, and that’s only if any movement is needed at all. The studio stands almost alone in this category now – even big games with teleportation at their core like Budget Cuts have added in this option. But smooth movement, as we all know, can make players sick. So why not include it as an option for those that want it?
“The concept of options implies that somebody’s paying attention to the options,” Eiche says, referring back to those first-time users. “And that’s a problem for us because we want to make sure that we are keeping people from getting sick.”
This is something Owlchemy stands firm on. Eiche even says that, if you can’t “tough it out” with teleportation, then you might want to skip Cosmonious. “There are lots of games on the Oculus store that only do smooth locomotion,” he says. “So if that’s really a deal-breaker for you then maybe this just isn’t the game for you.”
There’s crucial technical reasoning behind the move too, as Reimer explains: “We leverage the ability to tell teleport to actually make the game possible. So as you’ve experienced we have this splat system that allows you to color and paint every surface in the game in a way that some people say is like Splatoon. We’re running this on a mobile chipset at high frame rates in VR. And that is very wild.
“But part of the way that we can get that to work is that we have systems like, for example, when you teleport — and we use this all the time throughout our game — when the game fades to black, [we] re-do so much work that the CPU goes up to max and we go through, we rebuild meshes around you to make sure you have very high quality [in] the interactive areas that you can splat around you. We have systems like we have our custom LOD [level of detail] system that goes in and swaps those things out.”
On the flipside, Cosmonious also places less of an emphasis on room-scale movement. It’ll work still, but Eiche says the team’s seen the trends on how often this approach is actually used. “It just made more sense to see where everyone was going,” he reasons. “And…this kind of more discrete teleportation is what people like, and it allowed us to be more free with the levels.”
There’s a lot that’s different about Owlchemy’s approach with Cosmonious High, then, but one thing that hasn’t really changed is the tech it’s playing with. Yes, the industry has introduced standalone systems but the core platform of one headset and two tracked controllers remains largely standard. New tech, however, is on the rise: Quest’s hand-tracking feature (which was added into Vacation Simulator) continues to improve, and Project Cambria promises to bring eye and face-tracking into the fold too. Owlchemy doesn’t plan to implement these features in Cosmonious right now, but it’s watching and working on them with a keen if cautious eye.
“From my standpoint, I’m convinced [hand-tracking] is a huge part of the future,” Reimer says, noting how much more seamless the experience can be for new users, not to mention developers constantly putting down controllers and losing them.
As for Cambria’s new features? “Face tracking is very interesting,” Eiche says. Then there’s a plot twist: “Eye tracking is mildly interesting.”
For social, the developer says, both features will be incredible additions to the VR ecosystem. But Eiche believes eye-tracking won’t be hugely beneficial for input. “Eye-tracking is terrible for user experience,” he says. “And the reason why is — and this is what I challenge you to do — pick like a letter on a page. I did a demo like this– at a booth, won’t name any names — with an eye-tracking demo and stare at it for five seconds and don’t move your eyes. That’s not how eyes work.
“The thing that they never showed in the Superman movies is the fact that your eyes move around all the time and that it would just be this horrible thing to have with laser beam eyes,” Eiche jokes.
Reimer agrees, adding that our bodies are naturally inclined to turn our headsets to what we’re looking as so it’s in the center of our vision. “But eye-tracking, combined with face-tracking for social, I think that is one of the big missing pieces moving into the future. And I think that people don’t realize that because they haven’t had it yet to understand kind of the ramifications of that coming into play.”
That’s all future talk, though, and we know what Owlchemy thinks about shortcuts. Cosmonious High will represent what the team thinks VR is capable of in 2022, and we’re looking forward to digging into what its latest playground really has to offer.
Cosmonious High releases on PC VR and Quest 2 on March 31.
