Townscaper is a clever little town-building experience that gained fame back when it first launched on Steam Early Access in 2020. Now developer Oskar Stålberg has taken interest in VR design, showing a prototype of the pint-sized town creator running in VR.

Stålberg took to Twitter today to ask some design advice from the VR developer community, offering a glimpse at Townscaper’s quaint little models being plopped down and manipulated in VR.

It’s not clear whether Stålberg is definitely bringing Townscaper to VR at this stage. When asked what platform he was targeting, or whether this meant he was adding VR support to Townscaper, Stålberg answered he was “considering many things.”

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Still, it appears the indie dev has gone fairly far with implementing basic VR support. It seems all major functions are there in the prototype shown above, including building placement, color selection, modification, and a grab-style locomotion scheme—something the developer says “[f]eels tactile.”

It’s decidedly an early prototype; color palette placement, button labeling, how to rotate the world, and many other finer points are still in the works.

Although it’s unclear whether it means VR support is a sure thing, Stålberg has historically been very transparent throughout the design process however, so we’ll be following along on Twitter to see just what comes next.

And yes, we’re definitely hoping for a Quest version.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
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    It’s just a relaxing city painter? Could be interesting, especially if they lean into how you can export your towns, but I think they need to come down on either building a city model or a toy town that you could place like a lego set somewhere.

  • Saw this on Twitter yesterday! Townscaper is a really beautiful little creative sandbox and the value-add for putting it into VR is obvious; in fact some of the screen-space interactions with the existing desktop version with the mouse could clearly be better if one worked spatially instead. Even if this just materializes as a little demo apk on SideQuest, I’d buy it.

  • Looks cool!

  • Pablo C

    Currently half way there with Vorpx .

    • Raphael

      No. Vorpx is a VR emulator. It’s clever but certainly not half way there.

      • Pablo C

        Given this game simplicity, it´s kind of half way there (like, why would you need touch controlers for it).

  • waetherman

    Notoriety: the state of being famous or well known for some bad quality or deed.