Gadgeteer, which released last year for PC VR and Oculus Quest, aims to be VR’s ultimate Rube Goldberg machine. With some new updates and optimizations, the game should get a little bit smoother for users. But that’s not all — it looks like the developers want the game to conquer AR as well, with a Magic Leap release on the horizon.
Gadgeteer is a VR game that is infrequently discussed but incredibly cool in concept. Everyone, at some point in their childhood, probably set up a chain of dominoes to knock over or created elaborate mazes for marble balls to travel through. The problem is that in the real world, you’re limited by how many materials you have and your physical space constraints.
Gadgeteer eliminates these problems — the only limit to your creations is how much the game’s engine can handle. And with a new update, Gadgeteer has made big optimizations that should now allow for much bigger and bolder creations. It’s time to go wild!
In a Reddit post, the developers noted that new optimizations (some of which were made when porting the game over to the Quest) include reducing per-frame computation time, resulting in an 80% reduction in CPU load, and various other optimizations across the game, including GPU performance improvements. Across the board, this will allow players to “build bigger and more complex chain reaction machines” compared to earlier versions of the game.
There are some other non-optimization updates as well, including visual clarification changes on frozen blocks and some other quality of life changes. Additionally, all the different versions of Gadgeteer can now be managed by the development team in one unified Unity project, which will save the team lots of time while developing future updates.
However, perhaps the biggest announcement in the post was that the team is bringing an AR version of Gadgeteer to Magic Leap platforms. While the AR version of the game was only mentioned in passing in the Reddit post, there’s no doubt that Gadgeteer is a perfect fit for augmented reality.
Remember those domino chains or marble mazes from your childhood? Now imagine being able to create and place AR versions of those in a real environment, with far fewer limitations. It sounds like a fantastic idea, but we might be waiting a while — we’ve not got any details on release date for the Magic Leap version yet.
The ‘Well-Thawed Out Update‘ for Gadgeteer is available for PC VR and Oculus Quest now.
