Hello racers,
We just wanted to give you a little update on what we've been up to during the summer. After releasing the game on Oculus Home for our friends with Rift/Rift S headsets, we took a little time off to recharge, and then we focused on the following things:
Neon Tracks
We're reskinning all existing tracks in neon style, for a new game mode that will let you race through gates, and shoot drones that try to slow you down with mines. Here's a couple of in-progress screenshots:
.
Here's an early test video we did in spring, if you haven't seen it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnW-wKtiVMI
Telemetry
We've partnered with a couple of hardware vendors to explore how we could hook up the game with motorbikes for arcades. We'll tell you a bit more about that in september. The goal for us is to provide an API for anyone in the DIY scene who wants to read telemetry data from the game to drive external devices, like a fan, a buttkicker or even a bike on hydraulic cylinders.
New Zakhar track
We have a new Zakhar track currently in internal test. We expect to release it in september to keep you busy. Here's a couple of screenshots...
.
Career mode and bike customization
We've laid the fundation for the career mode. We feel that the game currently lacks a sense of purpose, so we want to provide you with a progression system where you participate in championships to unlock bike parts and improve your vehicle's racing capabilities. Still a bit early to show you how that looks, but we felt we should tell you it's coming.
V-Racer Hoverbike on mobile VR?
With all the hype around Oculus Quest, we've had a lot of you asking if V-Racer would ever make it to a stand-alone VR headset. It's not a easy feat to port the game as it is to lower spec hardware but we always like to push limits, so we figured we'd spend some time to see if we could even get it to run at all on Quest. We still haven't decided whether we'd fully go down that path, but we did create a prototype that got us excited. We had to remove all the post process fx, and cut down the textures and geometry quite a bit, so it obviously doesn't look as good as on PCVR, but we're excited to see that we can keep the core gameplay and provide a cool experience on Quest, with potential for cross play with PCVR racers.
Before we move on with this idea, we want to take time to test it internally with a few players. One key aspect that we haven't validated yet is whether a 72Hz framerate is high enough for such a fast game, so we want to see if people get any motion sickness with that lowered frequency (we're running at 90Hz on Rift/Vive/WMR). Also, we still haven't pitched the idea to Oculus, so it's not entirely in our hands whether this will eventually happen or not. Let us know what you think about a Quest port in the comments.
Have fun racing, we'll keep you posted!
The VertexBreakers Team