Most of the things that move were exported and then heavily optimized with Quest specifications in mind, but we kept a large part of the static assets.ĭrifter Entertainment has noted that multiview allowed the studio to squeeze out as much performance out of the Quest’s GPU as possible. Tonks: We reused assets wherever possible, both to cut down on production costs as well as staying true to the original game. Was Drifter Entertainment able to re-use any existing assets or did the studio have to recreate many of them? Tonks: Once we gave the physics engine its own little corner of the CPU and fixed a handful of minor bugs caused by the move to Android, things mostly “just worked.” Although, there was some effort required to simplify the physical complexity of things in the game to relieve some of the physics burden as well. Was it a challenge implementing the game’s physics?

With lots of toys like slow-motion bullets and throwable weapons, Robo Recall features a lot of physics. The last piece of the puzzle was tuning the engine to utilize every last scrap of the CPU and GPU that we could. So, initially there was a lot of 'this thing had 40 components, but we can achieve the same result with three.” I think the effort was equal parts good-old-fashioned optimization of assets, and trimming all the fat off the implementations of all the various gameplay systems. When you’re making a game for PC, you don’t necessarily have to worry about how the buildings in your level are composed, or how many bits and pieces are on all your characters. For the most part, we immediately knew what was going to run on Quest and what needed to be trimmed, re-thought, or remade. There is some advantage to knowing ahead of time what the exact capabilities of the device you’re shipping on are. Tonks: The short answer is: lots of elbow grease. Fortunately, our obsession with keeping gameplay identical paid off, and we didn’t have to make any cuts.Ĭonsidering that Robo Recall initially launched on the Oculus Rift, which required a relatively beefy gaming PC, how did the studio manage to get the game working on the Quest’s more modest mobile processor? Originally, we were worried we might have to curtail some of this stuff to make things run at a consistent frame rate. The number of enemies is the same, weapons work the same way, and all the awesome physics-based animation features of the original are still there. We bent over backwards to make sure nothing we did would change the feel (or scoring potential) of the original game. I’m here to tell you that is not the case. I think when people first heard the game was coming to Quest, they would assume there would be less enemies, less physics, less mayhem, less everything. Tonks: We are proud to say the gameplay is virtually identical. Luckily, Drifter has strong ties to Epic and decades of collective experience using (and working on) Unreal Engine, which made us the perfect partner to help pave the way and show what is possible on Quest with Unreal Engine.įrom a gameplay perspective, how similar is the Quest version of Robo Recall to the Rift version that was shipped by Epic? As you might imagine, I think they were a little shy about letting just anyone work on the port. Technical Director Matt Tonks: With Quest’s focus being Rift-style gaming, getting Robo Recall on Quest was obviously something Oculus were very keen on seeing happen.Robo Recall is Epic’s game. In our discussion, the Drifter Entertainment dev outlines challenges the team had to overcome, elaborates on what optimizations netted the biggest performance gains, and shares Quest development tips.Ĭan you shed some light on how Drifter Entertainment has taken the lead on developing Robo Recall for the Oculus Quest? To shed some light on how the studio was able to accomplish this, we interviewed Technical Director Matt Tonks. What’s even more impressive is that Drifter Entertainment was able to bring all of this over with just seven people in six months. This means the game still features the same amount of enemies, physics, and spatial audio as the original title.

Fortunately, the indie studio's work paid off with Virtual Reality Oasis calling the Quest version, renamed Robo Recall: Unplugged, ' a blast!'ĭespite more modest system specs, Robo Recall: Unplugged plays identically to its Rift counterpart. On paper, this would be a challenging endeavor, considering the completely wireless VR headset is powered by a mobile processor and not a high-end gaming PC. Roughly two years later, Drifter Entertainment has been tasked with porting the game to the Oculus Quest. By Jimmy Thang When Epic released Robo Recall for the Oculus Rift in 2017, the game was designed to take advantage of powerful gaming PCs.

Robo recall unplugged vs robo recall