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Build a 'Fantastic Contraption' in virtual reality with the Vive
Virtual Reality is often characterized as a solitary experience, but it doesn't have to be. Games like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, a multiplayer bomb-defusal game, demonstrate VR's ability to entertain entire groups of people in wonderful new ways. Today, it's time to add one more multi-entertaining VR game to that list: Fantastic Contraption, a widely beloved game about building weird structures in an attempt to reach specific points on a small map. Fantastic Contraption launched in 2008 as a non-VR game and has since attracted millions of players and 12 million saved contraptions. In a new video, it gets a super polished update for the Vive, Valve and HTC's impressive room-scale VR headset, and creator Colin Northway discusses the merits of multiplayer VR.
(Not) Getting noticed on Steam Greenlight: Incredipede's story
In the indie world of secret handshakes and underground brunch meetings, there's a specific phrase for the following complex process, as described by developer Colin Northway: "Apply to Steam, be rejected, release without it, get popular, be noticed by Valve, release on Steam."This is widely accepted as the "Offspring Fling" submission process. It takes the name of Kyle Pulver's retro platformer, which launched on Steam in May, months after not launching on Steam, despite Pulver's attempts. Northway shares this rejection jargon with us in terms of his own puzzle game, Incredipede, and Steam Greenlight:"This is the path Offspring Fling took before Greenlight and it's the path Incredipede will take after Greenlight. It's kind of sad because I thought the point of Greenlight is to specifically avoid the 'Offspring Fling' situation."
