Fantastic Contraption: The Social Update (v1.1) has been released on Steam!

We’ve always said that VR is quite the social experience, and since our launch in April we’ve been experimenting with new features that help make things easier to share with your friends.

(Text not your thing? We have a quick video demonstration of some of the new features.)

Twitch Chat Integration

Having to take off your VR headset to check in with your Twitch audience – or just to hang out with your friends in your favourite channel – is a hassle. Well, hassle-be-gone! You can now connect to any Twitch channel’s chat box and view it within VR! This feature (found in the new Social menu) comes complete with emoji support and a resizable VR interface that you can place anywhere in your world. We’ll even show a fancy popup if you happen to get a new subscriber or follower!

Director Mode

Whether you are streaming on Twitch or just showing the game off to family at home, you often want to show the action from a different angle — without that VR sense of depth, your audience might not understand what’s going on. You can now enable Director Mode (in Settings) to unlock a bunch of cameras that you can place in your play space, or fly around with your keyboard to set up long distance shots. You can easily cycle between cameras with a set of buttons in VR and show the world just how epic things are from your point of view!

When being viewed externally, you’ll show up as a cute animal avatar – we have a unicorn, frog, sheep, and more! Don’t forget to put on a hat!

Mixed Reality

If you’re already in Director mode, why not replace your digital avatar with a real, live human? You can capture your humanoid-emotions easily with a quick trip to a mixed-reality dropdown box in the Settings menu. We let you choose between automatically integrating a webcam into the game, or you can compose your own scene (eg, using OBS layering) if you want to integrate fancy capture cards. If you chroma-key out a green-screen you can see yourself walking around in the game world!

We find that Mixed Reality is one of the most engaging and best ways to demonstrate the game, be it at conventions, streamed online, making trailers, or showing things off at home. To do it right you will need some equipment (green screens, a nice camera, beefier computer hardware) – but if you can pull it off it’ll look amazing.

Tweet that GIF!

Our old friend the eye-bug is back! Let it keep watch over you as a portable GIF capturing creature — grab onto it as it floats through your space and tap your Go button to start filming. The GIFs will save to your hard drive (in a folder easily accessible from the Settings menu).

And if you set up your credentials in the new Social menu, posting that gif to Twitter is as easy as tapping a controller button. Share your beauties!

Undo / Redo

We’ve all been there – you accidentally throw your whole contraption off the edge. You have to rebuild from scratch. You’re devastated. Well, “heroes never die!”

Those little menu buttons at the top of your Vive controllers are now Undo (left hand) and Redo (right hand). Experiment with the assurance that your mistakes are reversible!

… And tons more!

Though we mainly focused on the sharing features in this update, we have a whole ton of bug fixes, minor features, and [fully legal] performance enhancements in this update. Check it out!

In our next update we’ll be focusing on some new gameplay features and other exciting things we’re still keeping secret, but if you have any desires or find any bugs, be sure to let us know in the in-game suggestion box!

Here’s the full changelog: