Vacation Simulator Patch 2 Released - Accessibility and More!
Greetings, Vacationers!
Here at the Labs the Owls have been hard at work developing the next update for Vacation Simulator. We’ve been listening closely to feedback since the release and have made a number of changes we hope you’ll love!
At Owlchemy, we believe VR is for everyone and improving our accessibility helps us achieve that goal. For this patch, we focused on some key features that we believe will better help many of our players. We would love to highlight a few for you:
One Hand Mode
We strive to create interactions that feel natural, and we understand that not all players may not be able to use two arms simultaneously. We now fully support one handed play for 100 percent of the game! The game now detects how many controllers are powered on and, if fewer than two controllers are connected, we automatically make changes to ensure everything is playable with one hand!
Non-Audio Feedback Improvements
We love filling our worlds with humorous dialogue and text, and we want our players to not have to rely on speech or text to be able to enjoy the game. So, we’ve gone through the game and found places where we relied on text or speech as the only way to communicate critical gameplay information. We worked to modify those places to use icons and other visuals to better help all players understand the game.
Seated/Comfort Improvements
Being completely immersed in VR is a truly magical experience, and we want all our players to feel comfortable while playing the game. We heard it can be uncomfortable for some if they have to turn all the way around to go backwards, so we worked to reduce this as much as possible. We have gone through each space in the game and increased the detection area of players gaze significantly to ensure that we aren’t requiring extreme head movements.
We love developing room scale games, and we also understand that games that require walking present a challenge for some of our users. We’ve optimized our small playspace to better accommodate players with limited mobility, those who can only lean to reach and must remain seated or stationary during play.
And that is not all! There are many more things we addressed in the patch, from bug fixes to some fun changes— like our instruments now blowing bubbles when played underwater. You can read the full patch notes here.
Future Updates
You may have noticed one big accessibility topic missing— subtitles. We’ve been working hard on some R&D into how to best display subtitles in VR. We hope to have something exciting to show you all soon! Keep an eye on our Twitter for more updates on this in the future!
Special thanks to Google’s Diversity and Inclusion Group for providing feedback as we worked on these important accessibility features.
Bot Voyage, Humans!
-Owls