Blair Renaud’s first-person cyberpunk game Technolust is getting more detailed all the time, with the latest addition being a third-person mini-game for people to play at an arcade cabinet inside the world.
The new third-person experience is one of several standalone games he’ll be providing within the world. Here’s a look at the stylish mini-game prototype built by Renaud in two days:
Renaud raised nearly $50,000 ($64,477 in Canadian Dollars) for the game on Kickstarter in May last year and is planning to put a new beta out to backers and people who pre-ordered the game before the end of the month. It’s being built for the Rift with the same dystopian cyberpunk ideas being applied to another game for other headsets. Renaud has also teamed up with Quantum Capture, a Toronto-based company, to bring photo-scanned visuals into Technolust.
“It will all start to come together near the end,” Renaud wrote in a chat. “Actors need to be shot, story and a lot of unfinished content has been stripped from the beta releases…I’ll be working on it right up to Q1 [when the Rift launches].”
As one of the first developers to offer both a first-person and a third-person experience within the same title, I asked him to compare the two:
“Third-person is a lot easier. I wish I had started with third-person before the Kickstarter,” he wrote. “There are so many problems yet to be solved for first-person locomotion in VR. Both for room-scale and seated.”
Also, as an early indie VR developer, I wanted to ask about challenges and how he was holding up financially in the months leading up to the launch of the consumer Rift:
“The biggest challenge has been keeping up with ever-changing SDKs and software updates from Oculus, Unity, etc,” he wrote. “I’m doing OK for a one-man team. At my current burn rate, I should be able to make it to the launch of CV1. Hopefully that will be long enough.”
Renaud is submitting the game to the Unity and Proto Awards.
Check out some footage from the game:
