Development InfoRole: Game Designer, Scripting Team Size: 5 Time: 48 Hours Tech: Unity, SteamVR Platform: Windows PC - HTC Vive Genre: Cooperative VR Game |
Responsibilities
|
Game Overview
In "My House, My Rules", a game created for the 2019 Global Game Jam, two players can practice decoding an acquaintance's home environment and responding to social cues with confidence! The theme for this game jam was "What home means to you."
Player 1 (a.k.a. "The Ghost") explores the home, revealing the owner's tastes and preferences. With limited visual communication options (i.e. stickers), a subtle hint is left behind for anyone who might come calling.
Player 2 (a.k.a. "The Guest") must then attend a dinner in the home, reacting to requests from the host with as much accuracy and respect as possible using the remnants of their spectral sidekick's preliminary investigation. The two players are not allowed to talk during the game! The only form of communication allowed is through the stickers that The Ghost places in the level.
Player 1 (a.k.a. "The Ghost") explores the home, revealing the owner's tastes and preferences. With limited visual communication options (i.e. stickers), a subtle hint is left behind for anyone who might come calling.
Player 2 (a.k.a. "The Guest") must then attend a dinner in the home, reacting to requests from the host with as much accuracy and respect as possible using the remnants of their spectral sidekick's preliminary investigation. The two players are not allowed to talk during the game! The only form of communication allowed is through the stickers that The Ghost places in the level.
Design Process
Consistent Interactions
For Player 1 (The Ghost), the goal at each area was pretty simple and straightforward: choose and place a sticker. For Player 2 (The Guest), we wanted a similar type of consistency that would make each objective area mostly self-explanatory, and allow us to create a lot of objectives. With the exception of the first interaction at the front door, each area had 3 simple design rules:
|
New Tools and Workflows
We used this year's Global Game Jam as an opportunity to learn many new tools and workflows.
We used this year's Global Game Jam as an opportunity to learn many new tools and workflows.
- Instead of utilizing VRTK as I have used many times in the past, we decided to use the SteamVR 2.0 interaction system. This took a bit of getting used to, but ultimately I became familiar enough with it halfway through Saturday in order to implement the necessary features.
- We used Unity version 2018.3 so that we could learn the new prefab workflow. We all got up to speed on this pretty quickly. My favorite new feature with the Unity prefabs is the ability to create prefab variants, which allowed us to create a base prefab and then create variants from that. When updating the base prefab, those updates would apply to ALL variants. This was especially useful when implementing the many different objective areas which all required some of the same game objects and scripts for their core functionality, but also had their own unique objects and interactions (books, door knocker, dining sets, etc.).
- We used Unity's Lightweight VR Render Pipeline, which came with its own set of unique challenges, mostly in regards to object materials not appearing correctly.