“Active Development” Halted on Gone Home Oculus Rift

Gone Home seems like an obvious candidate for the 3D VR set Oculus Rift, the little device that’s already revolutionizing gaming for some people (or so you’d believe if you spent any time on Reddit). Still, it’s not as simple as that, and because of the extra work that would be needed to make Gone Home a “good” Rift game, the developer has announce active development has halted.

From IB Times UK, who interviewed Steve Gaynor, co-founder of the Fullbright Company:

Oculus Rift we have basically stopped active development on. We looked into it and what we discovered is that really, for a game to be good on Oculus you have to design it for Oculus.

We don’t have any body-awareness in our game and a bunch of UI [user-interface] pasted to the screen – 2D UI. Both of those things are tough with an Oculus game and we’re not going to go back and remake our UI or add a player body to make a good fit for Oculus.

When we were at Steam Devs Days and Oculus did a presentation they were basically saying ‘Oh your UI needs to be in-world and you should have feet so you can look down’ and we were like, no, it’s not worth it. We’re not going to do that.

That doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen, especially if Oculus Rift manages to sell a bunch of unit when it’s released to the public. But for now, the benefits don’t justify the work needed.