We hope you are enjoying this week's Farlands Developer Showcase! Today's update is an in depth Q&A about Farlands, the team, and the various projects they've been involved in. We've taken your questions from across the forums, Reddit, and our social pages.From the Farlands team, the following people contributed answers.Brandon Dillon: Creative DirectorBernie Yee: Executive ProducerRJ Ranola: Environment ArtistRobogabo: Concept ArtistBig thanks to everyone who participated in this Q&A, we look forward to hearing what you think in the comments.The Oculus Advanced Development Team’s based in sometimes-sunny Seattle, WA, one of the biggest concentrations of game development talent in the world. Our team’s built like any game development team - game design, art, engineering, audio, production and QA - and we’ve pulled from AAA, indie, casual and Hollywood.Our team has built ‘first contact’ experiences -- experiences designed to introduce users who may never have tried VR, to magical and transformative places that exist now not just in our imaginations, but seemingly ‘for real’. This really means trying to build first principles of VR development, applying what we know from our experience, but being ready to re-examine everything.Dreamdeck was an exercise in demonstrating convincing presence in consumer-level hardware; Toybox showed the power of hand presence and social play spaces; Farlands set a bar in visual quality and built around the idea that creatures can feel real to the player when they react and exhibit behaviors and personalities that change over time.Our goal with each project is to give people experiences they've never had before, whether it's standing in front of a living dinosaur, or making first contact with alien life.One of the most important considerations when making first-time VR experiences is that VR is an intense sensory takeover, and you have to be careful not to overwhelm someone while they're adapting to an amazing new medium. We work hard on comfort and pacing so that people can really absorb the magic.Farlands is a little alien planet that comes with your Rift. You're a researcher on a mission to study and make friends with a charming cast of alien creatures.You spend your time exploring the world, fulfilling the needs of the creatures, and taking lots of pictures for further study by the researchers back home. And the planet advances in real time - you can return each day to make new discoveries.We really wanted to have our players feel like they were really meeting real creatures who would react to the player’s actions.It always puts a smile on my face when I hear stories of VR enthusiasts having their Rifts coopted by family members who love visiting the creatures in Farlands. It's nice to have the game be enjoyed by people who didn't even start out as VR enthusiasts.There are an impressive number of launch titles, so I’m always happy to read about players who like to come back to Farlands and check in on their creatures after playing Eve or Lucky’s; they get that we wanted to build a place to relax and enjoy the world, which is something that games don’t really try to do! The visual presentation and the idea of a real world clock seem to set new sorts of player expectations, something we hoped would work.Oh, we had so many concepts for creatures! You can see a lot of them in the concept art Robogabo posted in the art showcase. One of my personal favorite ideas from Gabo was a creature with a fluted tusk that would find quiet spots to sit and play music.Yes! https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/37010/farlands-now-with-multiple-save-slots This is definitely something we thought about. We wanted Farlands to always be a relaxing and beautiful escape; a little half-hour tropical vacation you could take every day.Fun fact: when the weather system first went in, over half of the in-game days were overcast or rainy. Game development protip: don't let Seattleites tune your weather systems!When I was playing the build, I’d put on the headset and then get drowsy. It was this change of pace, from trying to finish Farlands, to a world that is beautiful and tranquil. It would just instantly make me relax.Originally the plan was for the creatures to age, die out, and have new members born into the herds under the player's influence, but we developed so close an attachment to our creatures that it was just too tragic to have them die off. Now the creatures in Farlands live forever.The voice director for Farlands, Kris Zimmerman, was also the voice director on the Metal Gear Solid series. She knew David, and thought he'd be great for the part. We were blown away when we heard his performance for Kloog - we didn't even recognize it was him at first.David has an amazing range for someone with such an iconic voice. He's extremely talented, very charming, and was an absolute pleasure to work with, as was Maria Bamford, Kris, and her team.Our art director, Kenneth Scott, has hidden more than one dopefish over the course of his career. We were working on all of the fish in the game, and were having so much fun inspecting them wriggling around in VR, we thought it'd be fun to pay homage to one of gaming's most famous fish.Farlands is designed to be a really easy experience to get into with just an Oculus Remote. Don't worry, there are some amazing experiences being built for Touch.Good eye! There are some other Farlands references you can spot in the Home environment as well.There are lots of easter eggs of our previous work in Oculus Home since our team built the Home environmentYou're using a telepresence system. In an earlier iteration, you actually stuck your head into an Oculus Rift in the cockpit to view things on the surface.Zoie units have AI that let them adapt to their current situation and hardware capabilities. That's why they can both operate as snack dispensers and help on important research missions.The Interplanetary Coalition is comprised of a wide array of different sentient lifeforms. As far as who you are personally, we decided to leave that up to your imagination.The fishbot is actually a mechanical part of Zoie that she teleports in as necessary. As far as how it catches fish without a hook or bait, probably some super advanced technology we wouldn't be able to understand.He's at least one head tall.We always draw inspiration from lots of sources and, of course, try to make the experience our own. Just to name a few that came up during development discussions, games like Animal Crossing, Pokemon Snap, Viva Pinata, Harvest Moon, Hey You, Pikachu!, Tamagotchi, Creatures, The Sims, and Neko Atsume were touchstones, as well as Jim Henson movies like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.Yeah, they are a mixture of attributes. If we wanted to make a predatory looking creature we would grab attributes from predatory animals - both appearance and behaviors. We wanted all the creatures in Farlands to strike a balance between feeling familiar but also unknown. For example the Giffle is a mixture of cat and plant qualities.