[SteamVR] V-RACER HOVERBIKE (VR futuristic racing game on Oculus/VIVE)

V-RACER HOVERBIKE is now AVAILABLE on Steam, for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality!

Come race with us!

Here is the trailer video :

And some screenshots (updates feb 2019, these were made using the game's photo mode accessible to every player, no photoshoping)



facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vertexbreakers/
twitter: @vertexbreakers

 

As we are still in active development on the game before it ships to Steam, I'd like to share our developer diaries on this page. You can read more here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/vertexbreakers



Developer Diary #1

Hello racers, after unveiling our VR game V-RACER HOVERBIKE, we've seen a series of questions raised here and there, mostly about the game's control system (how you play it), and the potential motion sickness that any fast-paced racing game may induce.

My name is Francois. As the lead developer of the game, I will try to explain how we built the game and what design decisions we made along the way. In the first two posts, I will focus on the intent to make it easy to learn, but hard to master. In a third post, I will talk about the issue of motion sickness in VR racing games. Later on, we’ll try to keep you informed on our development progress during alpha stage.

The idea of developing a fast-paced racing game in VR has always made me nervous. I have always been very sensitive to motion sickness induced by video games, and not only in VR. I could hardly participate in death matches in the office back in the Quake III Arena days, it was just too fast for me and made me sick very quickly. Racing games were ok, though. I could play Formula One games on PC, and enjoyed WipeOut quite a lot of Playstation. But when I first tried racing games in VR, well, it made me sick almost instantly. I remember my 3D-artist colleague and friend Jérôme having me try Assetto Corsa with Oculus DK2 and all the cool equipment he has in his basement (driving seat, force feedback steering wheel). I sprung from the startline and accellerated full throttle to get to the leading position, but then came a sharp right turn so I hit the brakes very hard and the few seconds it took the car to slow down were enough to make me feel dizzy for a half hour or so : the deceleration conviened by the visuals was never felt in my body, and my brain must have thought "oh oh, there is something very wrong, here". I just took off the headset and was done with it. Jérôme insisted and had me try Dirt in VR as well, but this time I think it was the roll of the car in the dirt tracks that made me feel bad.

So when Jérôme came up to me one day and said we had a business opportunity to develop a bike racing experience in VR, I was at first very skeptical...

Continued here: https://www.facebook.com/vertexbreakers/

 

It looks amazing! Good luck with your game!

 

Thanks, John!
Here is the second entry of our dev blog.

Developer Diary #2
In the previous post, I discussed how we came to develop the first iteration of V Racer Hoverbike, focusing on making the game easy to learn. In this post I'll talk about what we learned from it and how we decided to refine our design to make the game more challenging.
First, the good news for us at the event was that nobody got sick. I was personally very anxious about that, as I am very sensitive to motion sickness. Among the fifty or so people who tried it, we haven't heard any complains about people getting really dizzy after playing. Play time for each of them was fairly short, as we would usually have them race two laps, one to get them trained on how to control the bike and the second to actually make a time trial for the leaderboard. So it was about 2 to 3 minutes, but that's still quite enough to make someone sick in VR.
We also found that most people could get to the end of the track in a decent time, and as far as I recall we only had two or three of them who just gave up before that. Considering the target audience was probably one third gamers and two third non gamers, that was very positive.
So in the end, we were very enthousiastic about the response we had for the experience we had developed. We felt we really had something that could become a good VR game, so we decided to invest more time on it. We didn't really lay out a plan for exactly what we should have in a full fledged version of that game, but we agreed on some key principes.

Continued here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/vertexbreakers/developer-diary-2/1496257210458752/

 

Here's a short video of the hoverbike, modeled in Foundry MODO, exported as FBX for Unity. Texturing is done in Substance Painter, which is so fast to work with. Still WIP, but getting close to what we want in the game.

This video is grabed from Unity, and shows the highest LOD we want for the hoverbike in the game.

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Several people asked me to post the "ghost" shader we use for bikes to fade them when they get close to the camera. This inderlying idea is very simple --> it's just the standard shader in fade mode with a depth write prepass. Once the depth buffer is updated, writing the fading pixels for the bike looks just like opaque mode, with a fixed alpha value.

Here is a video showing what normal fade would look like, and what it looks like with the additional depth pass.

And I have atteched the shader file itself for those who are interested...

Btw we're getting close to releasing the game on SteamVR early access

 

New screenshots of the game. We've switched to deferred rendering, which let's us more flexibility for dynamic lighting... We're currently optimizing and tweaking visual effects so we can shortly sstart early access on SteamVR...

 

Another screenshot. This is in-game, taken from the photo mode. No additional photoshopping...

 

Working on the game trailer. Steam page has just been approved and will shortly be online...
If you like these visuals, please help us get the word out, join us on facebook.com/vertexbreakers and share !

 

Looks so good...

 

Video trailer is *almost* ready... stay tuned...

 

Here is a sneak peek at the upcoming trailer

 

Looks fantastic. Great work keep it up.

 

Thanks! Full trailer coming soon, and steam page for early access.

 

Trailer sneak peek #2

 

Working on photo mode tools inside the game. Race replays are displayed using CineMachine with a bunch on cameras positioned on the track and other ones simply following the player.
We added a pause feature, so we could fine tune view angles and post fx like DOF to create screenshots. Extending that, we can also do paused shots for the trailer, with an orbiting camera.

 

New gameplay featurette... The Steam page is coming soon... If you're interested check out facebook/vertexbreakers page.

 

The game will launch in Steam Early Access in April!

Here is the store page:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/668430/VRacer_Hoverbike/

 

April 13th.... Really really soon

 

Some people are taking simracing VERY seriously!

 

Twitch channel is live!

We just setup our Twitch channel : http://www.twitch.tv/vertexbreakers/

We gonna talk about V-Racer development, share some gameplay, and post Weekly challenge winner replay. Please help us be a Twitch affiliate and hit the 50 followers achievement!

 

Good to see the CAA sticker there...

 

One of our early fans is indeed in Quebec. This photo has lots of fun details. I personally love the fan on the desk ;-)

 

Combat mode gameplay video...

 

VR editing is great fun!
Here's our take on a bike livery VR editor for our game V Racer Hoverbike. What do you think ?

 

excellent, didnt know Unity could do that, is it multi-player?

 

Unity can do anything ;-)
Actually we are having our first test week-end with existing players in a couple of days. We support up to 6 racers in time trial and combat mode.

Here is a video we shot during our first tests with selected players:

 

Some screens made with the in game photo mode, to which we recently added a depth of field tweaking feature...

 

Unity didn't create this! The developer did. I get what you mean and Unity is capable of just about anything you need it to do, it's all a matter of your skill level and knowledge of the software.

 

thx alot for providing this shader.
Im struggeling with the depth pass for other objects with the same shader. In your example, you cannot see the back of the bike through the driver. But Ive tried it in my game and I can see every other ghost object. What is the difference, anything in the shader or the way how the materials are assigned?

 

Can you post a screenshot ? Each ghost is drawn separately so each ghost will occlude itself, but not other ghosts. If what you need is a ghost that occludes other ghosts then you probably need a more complex set up where every ghost first draws to the z buffer first, and then every ghost gets rendered

 

NODE Studios playing our game. How cool is that ?

 

how did you manage it, that the back of the bike is hidden behind the driver ? And you cannot see the legs of the driver as well.

 

I think this is pure luck. The driver is drawn first, filling the zbuffer. When the bike is drawn after, the rear of the bike is hidden by the zbuffer. If you look at it from different angles there are some angles that show that it is not actually correct, and the approach with filling the zbuffer first for both objects before drawing them with a transparant shader would be more consistent. If opacity is low (say 25%), players will hardly see the difference though.