Airspace Defender & Tablecraft Dev Talks Building Toward Meta Orion & Apple Vision Pro

Not Suspicious developer Rafael Brochado joined UploadVR for a deep dive into the development of two innovative games from his studio.

Airspace Defender is a paid mixed reality game that’s basically a spatial imagining of Missile Command, while Tablecraft just launched on Quest as a free-to-play science playground in which to learn about the periodic table of elements.

Our deep dive discussion with Brochado examined how each idea might evolve, and why we feel each project looks like a nice fit for developer kit support from Apple, Google, and others. We’d like to see these interesting ideas make it into more headsets, and we learned a lot of interesting details about the constraints developers like Brochado face building innovative software for headsets.

Airspace Defender & Tablecraft From Not Suspicious

Tablecraft and Airspace Defender are pretty divergent projects, but as Brochado explained in our discussion each represents a different exploration in the constraints of headsets and their underlying operating systems. In the case of Tablecraft, the game currently requires controllers and cuts you off from other people in the room with full VR. Airspace Defender, meanwhile, uses hand tracking and delivers the entire game in mixed reality views of your physical environment as a diorama-sized world appears in the middle of your play space. That’s because Brochado aims to explore how to make a compelling game for limited field of view AR glasses, ahead of Meta shipping developer kits.

With Airspace Defender, we discussed Resolution Games’ useful resizing gesture for diorama-sized worlds in Gears & Goo & Demeo, and how such a design change would force them to reconsider how difficulty works in Airspace Defender. We also talked about the extraordinary expense of Apple Vision Pro hardware and how the studio could make use of a developer kit for the game.

With Tablecraft, we considered how local mirroring on a tablet or other companion device for portions of the game world would make a cool addition for educational use. Brochado revealed they already built some of that functionality for educators to use in some settings, despite developer tools making it exceedingly difficult for them to accomplish.

We encourage you to check out the full video with Brochado embedded above to learn more about the challenges of development, and we’ll be following up with Not Suspicious in the months ahead to see how these projects develop.

You can find Airspace Defender and Tablecraft on the Meta store for Quest games.