Epic Games has had a long history of releasing new demo content at big gaming and developer conferences to showcase the latest Oculus hardware, and this year was no different. Oculus Studios provided funding to further develop the Bullet Train demo from last year into a fully-fledged FPS game called Robo Recall. This demo had one of the most polished and mature game mechanics expanding upon the Bullet Train bullet capture-and-throw mechanic into new weapons and upclose hand-to-hand combat with stylized arcade AI robots gone rouge.
I had a chance to talk with Epic Games VR lead Nick Whiting and artist Jerome Platteaux about their design process, deeper intentions, and overall art style and direction of the game. They debuted a new locomotion technique that was designed to help subtly guide players to facing the true north of the front-facing cameras, and Nick admitted that there are some design constraints to creating a game with the Oculus’ recommended front-facing camera arrangement. Jerome also said that there are new gameplay options that open up with a potential third tracking camera, but they didn’t give any more specifics as to whether Robo Recall intends on supporting the optional room-scale type of gameplay.