Beloved roguelite shooter Roboquest (2023) isn’t a VR game, but it will be soon thanks to VR porting team Flat2VR Studios. In a VR Developer Direct interview, Flat2VR talks about just what’s behind the studio’s next big port.
“Roboquest started as a passion on the flatscreen game, because I love the game so much,” says Flat2VR COO Eric Masher. “I love playing it. We saw the dynamic movement, double jump—there’s rail grinding in it—every time I was in there, I was just like, ‘Man, this would make the perfect virtual reality game. Why isn’t this in VR?‘”
Masher details how he flew to Sweden to “cold call” the game’s publisher, Starbreeze Entertainment, to ask whether an official VR port would be possible, which turned out to be a surprisingly quick green light.
“We are really VR-ifiying every single mechanic that we can think of,” says Flat2VR CEO Jasmine Uniza, who reveals the game’s massive assortment of guns have been physically modeled for manually reloading—no small feat.
“Do you even understand how much work it is to just do one weapon. To figure out how to make one weapon feel good in VR and make it the VR version of it? But in a game like Roboquest, it’s so fast-paced, that all of a sudden doing this process of reloading really breaks the game balance. We had to do that for not one, not two, not ten, but something like 80 weapons.”
Masher talks about how the studio moved the game’s UI to the user’s wrist, putting ammo counters on guns, and making the game’s minimap not so oppressively ‘in your face’ was a big concern. Those immersive touches are what “makes the difference between a port, and a conversion,” Masher says.
Flat2VR’s says it’s currently working to bring its slate of projects to “as many VR platforms as possible, which includes Surviving Mars Pioneer, Out of Sight VR, Wrath: Aeon of Ruin, Postal 2 VR, and Flatout VR.
Meanwhile, the studio says it still has more to announce, although we should expect them at next VR Games Showcase, which is slated to take place in August 2025.
In the meantime, Roboquest VR is slated to arrive on all major VR headsets in Fall 2025, which you can wishlist over on the Horizon Store for Quest 2 and above, Steam for PC VR headsets, and the PlayStation Store for PSVR 2.
