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Little Cities and making a VR city builder for the Meta Quest 2

The teams at nDreams and Purple Yonder are looking to bring city building to the Meta Quest, so we chat with them to learn more about this VR experience.

Ozzie Mejia

March 2, 2022 4:00 PM

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Virtual reality has opened the door to create entire alternate worlds, allowing users to escape the doldrums of everyday life and retreat into a fantasy land. The VR platform seems ideal for city-builders, especially, which is where the teams at nDreams and Purple Yonder come in. They've put together a relaxing VR city-builder called Little Cities. To learn more, we spoke with NDreams Communications Manager Tom Davidson, VP of Publishing David Corless, and Purple Yonder co-founder James Howard.

"Some of the challenges have been that something that you might think would just work from PC in VR, you just find isn't going to fly," Howard told Shacknews. "Just being able to have this kind of perspective where you could be looking over the entire city at once, obviously you have performance things to worry about, because on a traditional game, you can restrict the view. Players can build whatever they want, so there was a ton of work done really early on just to make it, as approaching performance-wise, making it run really well on the Quest."

Davidson, Corless, and Howard also discuss the challenges of working with new interfaces, the differences in working with various VR headsets, the challenges in development brought on by COVID-19, and much more.

Little Cities is expected to release in Spring 2022 on the Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest. For more interviews like this, be sure to check out Shacknews and GamerHubTV on YouTube.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?