Build-A-Baby

Development Info​

Role: Game Designer, Scripting, 3D Artist
Team Size: 4
Time: 48 Hours
Tech: Unity, SteamVR
​Platform: Windows PC - HTC Vive
Genre: VR Creation Game

Responsibilities

  • Pitched original concept, contributed to designing baby attributes, building system, and randomized order tickets.
  • Designed and built level layout
  • Scripted baby parts spawning in machine based on chosen quality number
  • Scripted VR camera rig and all VR interactions - picking up objects, opening oven-like doors, pushing buttons, and snap zone baby building system.
  • Created 3D models and textures for baby body parts and attributes, baby parts machine, tables, and bear hands
  • Implemented baked lighting in Build-A-Baby room
  • Implemented third-party 3D assets that fit within art style
  • Implemented music and sound effects

Game Overview

Welcome to the Build-A-Baby Workshop! In this experimental VR game created for the 2018 Global Game Jam, you play as a bear helping soon-to-be parents create their dream human babies through the transmission of genetics! Customers will send you their orders, which will contain things like desired physique or skin color, and you must fulfill their requests as quickly as possible. In this game, Bear build you!

The theme for the 2018 Global Game Jam was "Transmission."

Design Process

Ideation
We decided which game ideas to go with by taking 15 minutes to write down a bunch of different concepts on sticky notes and putting them up on a wall. I believe I had 5 or 6 different ideas up there. We would then go up and pitch each idea in front of everybody. It did not have to be incredibly detailed, just enough to know what the general idea was and how it related to the transmission theme. "Build-A-Baby" was one that I pitched as a game about the transmission of genetics from parent to offspring, where you would build people's dream babies (kind of like selective genetics). 

As we formed a team, we began a brainstorming session around the game's core mechanics and features. It wasn't originally conceived as a VR game. In fact, I was initially thinking something along the lines of a 2D point-and-click game to keep it less ambitious. But, as we talked more about it and how fun it would be to literally build the babies in VR, we decided to roll with that even though it would be more difficult to finish in the 48 hour time frame. There are a few things I would have liked to add in but simply did not have time for: a good visual design for the randomized customer order forms, more audio feedback, and a scoring system that would have compared your completed baby to the one requested on the order. While these features did not make it into the final product, I think we created a good foundation for something that could be very fun, weird, silly, interesting, and compelling.
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Posting and sharing game ideas
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Some notes we took during our initial design session
Building Babies With Snap Zones
Attempting to precisely interact with small objects in VR isn't easy, and in fact, is mostly just frustrating. Something I've used many times previously for precisely placing objects in VR is what I refer to as "snap zones". Once we decided on this being a VR game, I immediately knew I could use snap zones to create the building system. These snap zones essentially filter out any invalid objects and only allow certain types of objects inside of them, which is visualized by blue highlights of the correct object type. They also automatically snap those objects to their correct position, rotation, and scale when the player drops them in. This allowed me to:
  • Create snap zones for each type of body part (arms, legs, head, etc.)
  • Use these snap zones to create a pre-built layout for the babies that players would simply snap parts to
  • Increase the scale of smaller parts such as eyes to make them easier to grab, then scale them to the correct size once snapped to their zone
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The player places each body part into their unique snap zones
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Objects can begin at a larger scale, then scale down to their correct size when snapped to their zone