How Owlchemy Labs Built ‘Dimensional Double Shift’ Into a ‘Super Co-Op Game’ for Meta Quest
Anytime Owlchemy Labs has a new VR game in the works it’s an occasion worth celebrating! Today, we’re excited to reveal to you Dimensional Double Shift, an all-new cooperative experience that relies entirely on the Meta Quest platform’s hand tracking system. It’s out in Early Access beta right now so you can hop in and try it out for yourself for free. And it’s Owlchemy’s first-ever multiplayer VR game!
To learn more about Dimensional Double Shift’s wacky new brand of fun, we chatted with Andrew Eiche, CEOwl of Owlchemy Labs.
Andrew Eiche:Dimensional Double Shift is a 2-4 player, multiplayer, hand tracked game. It uses Owlchemy’s signature style. You and your friends are in a diner/garage whose parent company, Owlchemy Corp., has decided it would be cheaper if one diner garage covered multiple dimensions and has decided it’s yours, right?
So you are going to be serving the citizens of the omniverse across multiple dimensions as you cook and you fix their cars and maybe stuff blows up or you spray each other with weird fluids and all the kind of fun things that happen in Owlchemy games, but now with your friends. A few more notes on it, it’s free to play. The version we’re launching is an early access beta which will consist of only one dimension. Any appearance or similarities between Seattle are coincidental.
AE: Yeah, it’s actually Owlchemy’s first multiplayer game, probably ever. It’s definitely our first multiplayer game in the VR era and yeah, it’s cooperative. It requires 2-4 players, so you have to play with somebody else.
The entire design is built around the concept of, ‘How do we get people to collaborate together as best as we can,’ right? And you see that in the way that the game actually plays where as you’re doing orders, there’s lots of orders you can’t complete yourself. You need help from your friends who are also doing things and they need your help. And in the garage where you have all these modules, there’s a lot of co-problem solving and again, passing each other different materials or items that someone might need. And so it was purposefully built in this way to make it so that you can’t just work on your own.
Before I worked at Owlchemy, I actually worked a little bit in board games, and in board games we talked about ‘engine builders,’ which was a type of game where you could just, like, focus by yourself like you were playing altogether, but you would just build an engine, right? That is the opposite of what we were trying to make, right? We’re trying to make a game where it’s incredibly collaborative, where every player has an immense effect on each other and can help each other in awesome ways. And so all the things that came out of that is where we are today with this super co-op game. And there’s not really failing in our game, right? It’s not competitive. We took the competition out of it, because that also shades the way that collaboration works.
AE: Exactly. Overcooked is a great, like, framing to look at this, right? So Overcooked is a game about ultimately, about optimization in the face of chaos, right? How well can you organize yourselves in the face of chaos and do the optimal route? And any kind of creativity is going to be punished, right? Unless it somehow reveals an optimal route. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that’s an interesting feature of that game, right? It’s like you’re the chop guy. Stay over there, just chop the vegetables, right? In our game, it’s the opposite. Creativity is not just effort, it’s encouraged. And so you’re not going to cause the team to fail because you did something creative. Instead, you’re going to be allowing the team to have more fun.
AE: So, you know, Owlchemy games are built very systemically, right? So we have systems stacked on systems, and a lot of where the fun and humor comes from is in playing in the space of those systems.
So we have a sprayer, and you can attach anything to the back of the sprayer. It sprays water by default, and it’ll actually spray that liquid. Eggs happen to also be liquid. So you can put an egg on the back of the sprayer and spray egg and if you hit like, the spots where the grill is at, it will start making eggs on the grill. It’ll just start and now suddenly you’re grilling a ton of eggs.
Another example, there are times where you have to melt ice on this engine and there’s numerous, numerous ways that you can melt this ice. Or times you have to heat something up and we have fire in the game. So, in the garage, you might just use the blowtorch we have. That’s the most straightforward solution. You might take a drink from the hot sauce bottle and flames come out of your mouth and those flames are actually hot in the game because we have the system to build hotness. So now you can melt the ice with your fire breath. You might find another source of fire and spray the gasoline hose at it and turn the gasoline into a giant flamethrower and then use that flamethrower to put it out. You might take the spark plugs and have somebody turn them on and strike the spark plugs to use the sparks and flames to melt this ice, right?
It’s this breadth of things and as long as it should generate heat in some way, shape or form, it can generate heat. In a recent playtest, we flipped the spark plugs accidentally. And when you flip that switch, the thing you’re working on, lights on fire, and that fire spread across the car and then somebody used that to light their gas flamethrower on fire.
One more example would be putting out fire, that’s another fun one, right? In the garage, we have a number of ways to put out a fire. Somebody has a water hose. Very simple. Somebody else actually has a fire extinguisher. Extremely simple. But we also have cans of soda and if you played a past Owlchemy game, you know, you could shake any can of soda. So if you shake up a can of soda really hard, you could pop that and put out the fire with that.
AE: We have been on the record for a while now as saying that we think hand tracking is very much the future. Not that there’s not a place for controllers, but as the initial primary modality, the modality that the majority of people are going to understand, hand tracking is really going to be it. And then we add peripherals from there.
And yeah, this is like the latest, greatest version of what Owlchemy has done in hand tracking. It reminds me a lot of, like, the early days of VR, back when we had, you know, cameras with cables around us. Right at those first days, right at CV1 days, we were doing a lot behind the scenes to smooth out the experience of hand tracking. But at the same time we’re starting with a very good base.
We snuck some great stuff in there behind the scenes, though. For example, we stretch your fingers out a little bit so you don’t have to perfectly grab an object. Or as you release, we can grip onto it. Every object has all these different ways of gripping it, so we try to figure out what is a reasonable set and use a mix of programmatic and authored hand poses for when you pick up an object. And the end goal of all of this technical stuff is to make sure that when you interact with our game, you don’t have to think about a gesture to use. If you want to pick up a mug, you can pick it up by the handle, you can pick it up by the cup, you can pick it up by the rim and all of those work because that’s just the mental model you have that says, this is how I can pick up a cup.
AE: And with hand tracking, it goes even further because you don’t even have to say, hold your hands on this controller. You’re just like, ‘Grab or poke or whatever you need to do,’ with the hand tracking. Some of the interesting things, too, is from our perspective as developers, we used to have to watch people very closely to figure out what they were trying to do with their hands. But in hand tracking, because you’re mimicking real motions, a lot of times we could tell what somebody’s trying to do without even seeing their environment because we can see them pantomiming the action of hand tracking.
AE: Right, Alice is your boss. Your boss is an AI because obviously that’s the future we live in. She’s been trained on all the best words, but maybe doesn’t get it right all the time. English is this thing where she says combinations of words and hopes that you do what she wants. She’s there to encourage you and to keep you moving and to keep Owlchemy Corp. profitable. But Alice is not a very good AI. Alice is definitely mistrained and hallucinating and just saying weird things like, “Hello, my little potatoes.” It’s like Alice is probably the result of AI generated text training the next generation of AI on repeat, like 100 generations. And this is the horrible version of English you get that spits out of that.
AE: Yeah, we really wanted to do that because it’s free to play. We really wanted to make sure that we supported as many possible players as we can. It was no small feat to get a game like this systemic into the Quest 2, but we’re very happy we did it. It’s a free-to-play game in open beta right now, there’s no monetization in the game yet.
AE: We don’t have matchmaking. What we do have is we use the Oculus invite system, so you can just invite people in. We also use room codes, which we found to be extremely useful. You do need to bring your own friends. Owlchemy has a Discord community as well. You could join our Discord and find new friends that also have the game right now in beta. We have some thoughts on how to address that for beyond beta and ways we could do that. But the current thing in beta is we want to make sure you have at least some passing relationship with the people you’re playing with just because the game is so cooperative.
The other problem with matchmaking is, in a competitive environment, matchmaking is actually much simpler because when you matchmake somebody, you typically have this score that says how good they are. How do we score people alike with a lack of score? That’s why we kind of wanted to flip it on its head and we were thinking more kind of like older games where people can have rooms and bring people in, much like back in Counter-Strike way back when, like 1.5 days, right? You had a server and it was a space and it existed and you could go there. I’ll be there at this time and inviting that in. That just seems like a much better paradigm for us to use for connecting people.
AE: So we had a timeframe and then we realized that we wanted our players to really have a conversation with us about the game. So we threw the timeline out and what we’re going to be really focusing on, especially for the first 6 months of the game, is really during that beta period, hearing feedback, hearing what players like, hearing what could use adjustment and really building off of that. Because in our minds, the worst thing we could do is just be stuck with this content plan that we have to do and no matter what our players say they like or don’t like, we have to just stick to this plan. So we want to be able to be extremely responsive and then as we build out other dimensions and as we build everything out, we’re doing so with both our artistic vision and the community’s best interest at heart.
AE: I think the big thing about this game is this is an Owlchemy game through and through. Chaos isn’t just part of the game, it’s actively encouraged. It’s free. Dip your toes in and there’s no rules. Just go nuts and that’s what we really want to see. And then we want to hear from the people who love this game and the people who think the game could be better and make the game even greater than what it starts at.
Dimensional Double Shift is available now in early access beta for free on the Meta Horizon Store. Check it out for yourself and make sure to join the Owlchemy Labs Discover server to find new friends to play with!
