Fantastic Contraption

The new Fantastic Contraption is a remake of an old browser game in which you must transport a ball towards a goal by building a vehicle to carry or push it there, and it has been designed from the ground up to be a room-scale VR game. The game makes players feel like they are walking around a grassy island floating in the sky making a contraption the size of a horse with their hands then watching it roll out into the world. It's a one of the first virtual reality social experiences and it shows the direction this medium can take in the future.

History

The original version of Fantastic Contraption was a Flash physics game created by Colin Northway in 2008. In 2009, Northway sold his game to inXile Entertainment, an American video game developer formed in late 2002 by Brian Fargo, who later release it for iOS and, in 2010, made a sequel called Fantastic Contraption 2.

inXile entertainment stopped making web-games in 2015 and shortly after shutdown servers for Fantastic Contraption. The original game has been enjoyed by millions of players from all around the world and is currently available on the official website of the new, VR version.

Features

According to Andy Moore, a developer working on the game, the experience when playing Fantastic Contraption is like building a model ship in a real space. Players grab, resize, and position various types of rods and wheels in order to assemble contraptions with the goal of moving them past obstacles into the goal area. The assembly process can happen only in a designated workshop, thus giving importance to careful planning and preparation.

The game uses the two controllers that ship HTC Vive to let players manipulate objects around them and interact with the virtual toolkit. The gameplay takes place inside an area of at least 2m x 1.5m.

Fantastic Contraction will also ship with a livestream mode, which creates a single video stream with a combined footage from two in-game virtual cameras and one real-world camera. "You have your webcam, and a camera that only shows you foreground objects, so anything that’s in front of the head-mounted display, and that’s a game camera, and you have a game camera that only shows you background objects that are behind the HMD," Sarah Northway explained. The streaming process is currently quite complicated, but the team is working on making it simpler to use.

System Requirements

• Headset: HTC Vive
• OS: Windows 7+
• Processor: Intel Core i5 4590 equivalent or greater
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970/AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or greater
• Storage: 500 MB available space

Setup Instructions

Fantastic Contraption requires a play area of at least 2m x 1.5m.

Images and Videos

• Northernlion Plays - FANTASTIC CONTRAPTION on the HTC Vive! - extended gameplay footage featuring a popular Youtuber, who was invited to check out the game in person.
• Fantastic Contraption Teaser - short teaser video demonstrating the game using the prototype version of HTC Vive.
• Fantastic Contraption mixed-reality stream sample - a mixed reality stream showing the game from the view of the player and observers around him.