To make the Quest launch, the team had to work closely with all involved. We spent a long time fine tuning the color of the bloom in the new BIOS.” No one in a million years is going to notice any difference, but they have to be just right.
“The success of Superhot as a company, and as a product across all different platforms, is largely due to the perfectionist attitude people here have,” Underwood says.
The whole thing becomes an entirely new code base.” “You have to start with baby steps: is this going to work? Yes or no? Is this going to work? Well, kind of, but we are going to have to redo some of it. You can’t really rely on the way of thinking you had before, especially with this new hardware,” Thompson says. You are going down 100 times in power, but you are doing it for something that is really cool. “For me, and the rest of the team, it was just a fantastic challenge. The elegance of the resulting game may be a testament to the focus of the team and what they do. It takes this complete shift in perspective,” says Luke Thompson, lead programmer on Superhot VR for Quest. They were designed for a completely different architecture. There are huge differences between mobile GPUs and desktop GPUs. The whole way the hardware works is different. You have to think about things differently. It’s a huge drop in overall compute power and GPU power. Even from going from PlayStation VR to Quest is a huge jump. “You’re talking about something that is a couple of orders of magnitude less powerful. They had to rewrite almost every part of the game itself: how the bullets worked, how collision worked, how the enemies were built, and how the enemies moved. The team had to rewrite 98% of the graphical shaders. The tech challenge came from the fact that it was a mobile chipset.” The tethered versus tether-less stuff was not a challenge at all. And it was never built with a mobile platform in mind. There was a ramping up of getting people used to the codebase. “There’s bits of code in there from 2014. “The codebase we were working on was old as f**k,” Underwood says. When they began the task of porting the game over to the standalone VR headset about a year before launch, they realized that they had to throw out most of the code.
That has been alleviated since players may now select a new save file and just start fresh.īut as mentioned earlier, this patch is only the latest set of changes the team had to make to get it optimized for Quest. And once you did get friends inside, the Return pyramid that brought them back to the level select was present for these new players.
And it wasn’t very intuitive how to do that originally. This new mode of play, bringing a VR headset to a friend’s house and showing it off, meant players wanted to show off the game from the beginning, not just jump them into the middle. Besides the bug we fixed, feedback was, ‘How do we make this better to show our friends?’ It’s nice to be one of those games that people want to show others.” “But now we added this fake BIOS setting screen, where you can choose which save file you are using, or launch directly into guest mode. We expected people to Google it and find out how to do it,” Underwood says. We added a Guest mode floppy, which you had to find.
“People are taking it to their friends and showing them Superhot. The team added this as they saw how the Quest version of Superhot VR was being played differently than past iterations. The patch now allows three save files, giving players the ability to have different game states for different people.
It also changes how the game behaves after you start it.
These screens allow you to modify the visuals a bit by dimming whites, to reduce the flickering at the edges that some people are sensitive to. It is accessible when you start up the game by holding the A and X buttons during the OS boot up. Besides your typical bug-fixing, the patch added a new BIOS option screen to the game. Just recently, a patch for the Quest version went live. The Superhot team worked a lot to make it happen-more on that shortly-but they are still working.
You are untethered, free to move through the balletic action game. As many have already seen, Superhot VR (read our original Rift version review here) feels different on Oculus Quest.