After the pre-PAX craziness to get Time Machine VR ready for Early Access, we went to work on optimizing our tools and pipeline to improve and enhance your time traveling experience. Thanks a lot for all the feedback you’ve given us so far, it’s been super helpful, please keep it coming!
So, today, we’re rolling out Milestone 1, complete with bug fixes, redesigns, and new tools to improve your comfort level. We’re pretty excited to read your thoughts on all these goodies.
In summary, this is what we did:
- Keyboard Support: The game now supports playing with a keyboard, and has fully rebindable controls. Tutorial art to support this is not yet implemented, but planned for a future update. This feature will be added to the demo at a later date. UPDATE: Keyboard support has now been added to the Demo!
- Reworked the Mission Hub / Svalbard area: Moved all the portals around to make more sense, and improve navigation and comfort.
- Plot & VO: Re-recorded and replaced some Rob dialogue, as well as added FMVs of Research Director Elizabeth between levels. The mystery of Time Machine VR is beginning to take form!
- New DinoDex Phase 1: The DinoDex is now a central location in Svalbard, serving as a place to upload collected data and check out information about the creatures you’ve encountered. This represents a substantial change to the functionality of the DinoDex, and even more tweaks are planned for the future to make it even cooler.
- Resolution Options: New advanced graphics options menu to let players selectively turn more features on / off and select resolution scaling.
- Territories: Developed a back-end territory box tool for our level designers to map dino AI boundaries.
Here is a detailed breakdown of the changenotes:
Keyboard Support
You asked for it, so here it is! Many of you kept asking why we initially chose to have the game playable only on Xbox controllers. The one big reason why we didn’t initially provide keyboard support: control. A controller's thumbsticks allow for a smooth increase in acceleration, while keyboard controls have two settings: zero and max speed. This all-or-nothing control setup increases the risk of nausea, which we want to avoid as much as possible.
That said, we did listen and we hope that you’ll be happy with keyboard support. Our default layout is fully remappable, so feel free to customize it however you want. This also means that you can remap the controls and use joysticks, or any other controller that suits your fancy! We’re also open to changing the default key mapping, so if a particular configuration becomes more popular, we’ll switch our default to that!
Reworked the Mission Hub / Svalbard area
(a.k.a. Give my love to Norway)
We got asked a lot about land levels. We’ve always had Svalbard (Norway) as our Mission Hub, where players can go and select their next mission. But since it wasn’t a level in itself, we knew that we had to go back and give it the love it deserves. So, in this update, Svalbard has been entirely redesigned to be more intuitive, more comfortable to navigate, and prettier.
Plot & VO
When we first started development on Time Machine VR, we focused on performance and visuals to make sure you got a comfortable VR experience. We tested this again and again (even in our sleep), and we’re pretty confident that we’ve now got a winning formula so we don’t send our players to barf-town.
So now that we have got that established we’re now focusing on other stuff, like adding more plot elements to the game. In this milestone, we filmed and integrated three new videos featuring Elizabeth Lacroix, the inventor of time travel and founder of the Monda Muzeo (that’s Esperanto for “World Museum”) into our game.
New DinoDex Phase 1
(a.k.a. Gotta scan ‘em all!)
To make our dinos as lifelike as possible, we worked closely with McGill University’s Research chair in Vertebrate Paleontology. In the process, we got a ton of fascinating facts that we thought it would be cool to share with you. So we created the Dinodex, where you can access all of the information you gathered.
As you saw in the first version of your game the Dinodex is accessible in Svalbard and now we have made the Dinodex more important for the flow of the game. Now you’ll be able to track your progression and see how much information you have gathered and how much more needs to be discovered on each dino.
Resolution Options
(a.k.a Enhance… Enhance...ENHANCE)
Another comment we received a lot from the community was a request to adjust the graphics quality. Some people wanted lower resolution graphics for a higher frame rate and more comfortable experience, while others have massive beast-like computers that they want to be able to push to their full potential. To accommodate these varying requests, we’ve added new advanced graphics options to allow you to turn more features on/off and increase or decrease the resolution scaling.
While we are happy to provide this option, when you increase the resolution quality you risk affecting the performance of the game, which increases the chances of nausea. We set our default values after extensive testing for a perfect balance between performance and prettiness, and if you increase the resolution above the recommended level we are not responsible for any puking that goes on.
Tool Time: Territory Box System Improvement
(a.k.a. Look INSIDE the box!)
In order to create the most natural looking dino behavior, we created a system of territory boxes that defined where they could and couldn’t go. Unfortunately for our level designers, the first version of this tool required putting hundreds of boxes into a level, which was very time consuming. In order to cut down on the time it takes to place these boxes, our lead programmer, Julien, modified the territory box system to allow boxes to be manipulated into any convex shape.
With this improved system, dino territories can be larger and can be set up much faster, allowing us to create levels more efficiently. Of course, you won’t be able to see these boxes when you play the game, we are just super proud of what our programmers can do and wanted to share it :)
And that's it for update #1!
See you in the past,
The Minority Team