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about  ·  buy  ·  news  ·  team  ·  presskit


ABOUT THE GAME

Fantastic Contraption was originally a building game made way back in 2008.
Millions of people played it obsessively and saved over 12 million contraptions.
You can still play it for free. For years we loved the idea of a 3d Fantastic
Contraption but couldn't figure out how it would work. Then we tried the Vive.

The new Fantastic Contraption has been designed from the ground up for
room-scale VR. Imagine walking around a grassy island in the sky while you build
a machine the size of a horse with your own hands. Press play and watch it
trundle off to reach the goal on the other side of the island. With 40+ levels
and infinite solutions, it's a VR experience you and your friends will play for
hours.

Fantastic Contraption was a launch title bundled with the HTC Vive and is also
available for Oculus Touch and PS VR. Download screenshots and more at our
presskit or contact us at FantasticContraption@gmail.com.

The wheel moves your contraption and brings it to life
 
The stick attaches everything together
 
A water stick can move through other objects
 
Bring the orb to the goal area in each level
 


BUY THE GAME





Commercial licenses (eg for arcades) available via Steam's "Cyber Cafe" Site
Licensing Program for $20/month/seat, or in a discounted VR bundle with 8 games.
(how to sign up)


NEWS


FANTASTIC CONTRAPTION CLASSIC ON STEAM!

11 August 2020, 1:36 am

Adobe has announced they’ll stop updating the Flash player on December 31, 2020.
At that time, the original Fantastic Contraption will cease to be playable in
most browsers. We’ve got new projects on the go but didn’t want to let our very
first game disappear when Flash does, so I’ve ported it to desktop PC as:

Get it now on Steam and RobotCache!

Yes, it’s a classic. 14 million players, 13 million shared contraptions and 70
thousand user-created levels over the last 12 years. It’s been used in schools
and has inspired folks to become engineers and game developers. After its
initial release in 2008, there was a mobile version (retired), a sequel, a
spinoff (unreleased), a spiritual successor (also unreleased), another spiritual
successor (Incredipede), and a 2016 VR evolution.

The desktop version includes FC2!

The game’s lesser-known Flash sequel was made in partnership with InXile
Entertainment’s Flash wing Sparkworkz. You can still play a free version of it
on Kongregate.com, though the online features are long since broken.

It features magnets, moving levels and challenge modes like green (no powered
wheels) and clean (all pieces must end off the screen). It’s included as a bonus
with Fantastic Contraption classic!


From @BrianTheDrumer‘s epic 2016 Greatest Contraptioneers 5 compilation

When I started the PC port, I was surprised to find the Fantastic Contraption
community still active despite our near-total neglect.

The new discord server is hopping with friends sharing custom levels, organizing
challenges, and modding the game. Their enthusiasm turned what was going to be a
quick and dirty job into a more caring update, as they helped me add some new
features and fix things that had been broken for a long time.




I’m thankful solutions are ranked since there were a million to choose from for
this trailer.

Flash had a big impact on our lives and on the game industry, and though it’s
been effectively dead for years, it’s still sad to see it officially go. Check
out this excellent visual article by Jonas Richner for more about this important
medium.


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CHEAPER BIGGER FASTER STRONGER

12 February 2018, 5:54 pm

Fantastic Contraption version 2.0 is now live! Happy Valentine’s day, Neko loves
you!



We’ve been working on this update for a year now, and we’re excited(/relieved)
to finally get it into your hands. This version is packed with new content, new
features, and a ton of back-end improvements, but first:

 

CHEAPER

Version 2.0 comes with a 33% permanent price drop. Fantastic Contraption is now
available for $19.99USD everywhere!

Pricing has always been something we’ve had to approach carefully. As we were a
launch title for the first commercially-available VR, there was no data on what
was appropriate or expected from consumers. Now that the market has settled down
a bit, we think that $20 or so is fair for everyone and in line with
expectations. And if you buy now, you’ll essentially have $10 you didn’t before!
That’s like… a pizza! A… a small pizza, but a pizza! You’ll be losing free money
if you don’t buy today!

 

BIGGER

DOUBLE THE LEVELS!

We’ve put a ton of work into our puzzle-set and have created a whole new
“B-Side” playlist for you to enjoy! The game now boasts over 100 levels,
smoothing out the introductory learning curve and adding some high-end
challenges for those Contraptionistas that find the late-game too easy. Share
your new solutions! Show us what you’ve got!

 

FASTER

Fantastic Contraption 2.0 runs faster on every machine now!

We’ve been making separate versions of Fantastic Contraption for different
platforms, as each new piece of hardware had different technical requirements or
minimum specs. Gameplay is the same between all platforms if you have the latest
and greatest hardware, but what if you don’t have a supercomputer with a
dedicated AC room? We’ve put a bunch of probably-disqualifying
performance-enhancing code into each edition of the game to make it sing
uniquely for each platform.

What we’ve done in Version 2.0 is merge all of our performance fixes into one
master build. This means that if you have a computer that is below min-spec on
any platform, you should still be able to play without our physics engine
grinding your CPU to dust! This also means that if your CPU is heavily loaded
with other tasks (Twitch streaming, mixed-reality compositing, etc.) the game
will keep chugging along at a comfortable 90+ FPS.

This required us to rework how physics work so if reality starts falling apart
for you, maybe try RAMing some CPUs onto your DVD-ROMs.

 

STRONGER

Fantastic Contraption has been hitting up the gym every week and is really
starting to show some progress! It’s been simultaneously doing low- and
high-carb diets and the results are amazing!

But also, now that you’ve made it this far down in the update news, I’ve got a
secret to let you in on. All those dirty article-skimmers won’t know about this,
but those B-Sides levels? They also include a handful of levels featuring
all-new gameplay mechanics: Cactuses (that destroy bits of your contraption on
touch) and Balloons (that give your Contraption buoyancy to float over Cactuses,
gaps, and other challenges).

These new elements aren’t a big part of this update; they’re little teasers
we’ve thrown in, things that we’ve been working on since version 1.0, way back
when VR was just a baby. They’re just two fun toys in a whole toolbox of things
that were cut for the initial version of the game. You can access these new
elements in the Level Editor though – so you can generate (and share online) all
sorts of zany things for the world to see!


PS VR and Microsoft Store contraptionistas: You are also getting the 2.0 update!
It’s all done on our end, we’re just waiting for their quality control
inspectors to finish going over it all with a fine-toothed-magnifying-glass.
That’s a thing, right?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


CONTRAPTION PS VR LAUNCHES JULY 11TH

7 July 2017, 4:58 am

Thanks to a ton of hard work at Radial Games, Fantastic Contraption will be
coming to PS VR next week! Here’s the announcement (reposted from the Official
Playstation Blog).



Chris Floyd from Radial Games here, with an exciting message from our giant
videogame zeppelin flying high overhead. We’ve been working day and night to
create a most exquisite and whimsical virtual reality morsel: Fantastic
Contraption for PlayStation VR!




RELEASE DATE

That’s right! We’ve been having a blast creating Fantastic Contraption for
PlayStation VR, and we’re excited to announce that we’ll be sharing all of our
hard work with you on Tuesday, July 11th, 2017. National Fantastic Contraption
Day, mark it in your calendar! It will retail for $19.99 usd with an extra
launch-week-special 10%-off if you have PlayStation Plus.




SEATED GAMEPLAY SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED FOR PS VR – THE MOST RELAXING WAY TO PLAY
FC!



Sure, you could stand around, windmilling your arms in our magical virtual
reality wonderland, but now you have the choice to sit back and play Fantastic
Contraption right from your couch! Imagine! We redesigned the gameplay
experience especially for PS VR, taking advantage of the likelihood that you
have a favorite place to relax in front of your PlayStation 4. We’ve included
special PS VR-only features that allow you to resize and position your gameworld
at the press of a button, which we’re sure you’ll find slick and amazing.

It has fast become my favorite way to play, and makes contraption-building feel
a whole lot like model-making, which we are Very Big Fans of here at Radial
Games.


NEW, UNIQUE LEVELS FOR PLAYSTATION VR






We have a handful of brand-new, PlayStation-exclusive levels in the release. Try
your hand bouncing around some moguls, attacking a big-bricked wall, and more!
We’ve designed a few challenges specifically around seated play, and we know
you’ll enjoy them.


DYNAMICALLY RESIZE THE ENTIRE WORLD IN THE BRAND-NEW RESIZE ISLAND



Welcome to Resize Island, where you can dynamically resize the entire world
around you! This opens a world of customization for your preferred way to play.
You can make the world really huge to fit your standing-style gameplay
preferences, or shrink it all the way down to fit on your lap, where you can
marvel at tiny Neko. That’s right, THE CAT RESIZES TOO. You can do anything in
videogames.




PS4 PRO ENHANCEMENTS

For those of you with a lovely new PS4 Pro, we’ve spiced up the game a bit extra
for ya:

 * 8xAA – We averaged out all those sharp corners for smoother looking curves!
 * Higher-resolution textures – you can almost smell that wood-grain!
 * Improved backdrops and scenery
 * Additional special-effects and visual flairs
 * Extra island decorations
 * 125% resolution oversampling – A fancy way of saying that things look real
   sharp in there.

Let us know below what you’re most looking forward to, and I hope to see you
having a great time with Fantastic Contraption when it launches next Tuesday!


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For more news see the Northway Games development blog.


THE TEAM

 
 
 
 
 

Colin Northway is doing programming and design for Fantastic Contraption. He
made the original Fantastic Contraption, Incredipede and Deep Under the Sky. He
and Sarah Northway spent the last 5 years traveling the world while working on
their games.

Kimberly Voll is our resident VR expert - she’s spent her career so far studying
player cognition and game design, and specializes in UX, AI and gameplay. She’s
got a PhD in computer science, and an honours degree in cognitive science, and
has worked on too many games to list, including ROCKETSROCKETSROCKETS. (She
blogs at zanytomato.tumblr.com.)

Lindsay Jorgensen is doing art and design for Fantastic Contraption. He’s worked
at Bioware, Radical Entertainment, Big Fish Games and joined Radial Games in
2014.

Gordon McGladdery aka A Shell in the Pit is doing sound and music. He is a vocal
binaural and VR audio enthusiast whose past projects include Rogue Legacy
(Cellar Door Games), Invisible Inc. (Klei Entertainment) and is the composer for
the Youtube Channel Smarter Every Day.

Sarah Northway is working on programming for Fantastic Contraption. She's best
known for her popular Rebuild series which she wrote while traveling the world!

Andy Moore started his game development career doing Community Management and
Design for the original Fantastic Contraption, and has since founded Radial
Games -- responsible for ROCKETSROCKETSROCKETS, Monster Loves You!, and
SteamBirds. He's also a licensed commercial pilot and will talk your ear off
about airplanes. (He blogs at captain-andy.com.)

 
 
 
 
 

 

Plus all the awesome new folks who've joined the teams at Radial Games and A
Shell in the Pit Audio!

Fantastic Contraption © 2015