Yea so, making games in 24 hours is rough. We decided at the start our goals for this jam (2 of 3’s first game jam) was to learn about developing games in VR. In that respect it was a success.

The Device, is a sort of narrative interactive experience. You wake up in a stasis pod on a derelict space ship. You don’t know why you’re there. In the pod in front of you is a holographic map and drone. You can pick up the drone and place it on a room in the map (this needs work). The drone has a status message to tell you what the real drone has found in the room. After resolving the issue in the room you get a piece of the story. As you figure out how to re-power each room, you find out more of what went wrong and who you are.

In the jam version of the game, we only got through the basic environment development and the pick up part of the drone. In our test scene, we used flat surfaces for drop targets. We realized too late that while in the pod we needed to tilt the ship map towards the player for them to see without occluding the bounds of the pod. This was an oversight that cost us. I think if we were to do it over again, we probably would have built the map flat on a table surface and gave more room in the pod. This would have given the player more room to work.

Additionally, we didn’t get to any of the story elements. We simply ran out of time. We hit a couple of bugs. After transferring our prefabs from the test scene to the art scene, things went haywire. First, our drones simply exploded all over the room and into the void. It took a bit of time to release that I used a basic cube as light blocker for the ambient lights. Not remembering that Unity puts a collider on its primitives. Our test scene was outside so we didn’t have this issue.

Mr. Phil our teams programmer did make some cool game logic in our drones. Room destinations would dynamically change what the drone found. Some rooms would be full of fire and need to be extinguished. Sometimes your drone made it back, other times it didn’t. We had code in place to respawn new drones, but for some reason at the last minute the code stopped functioning. The player gets stuck when they drop a drone. We will probably fix this so the demo is more playable. We also finished an animated final scene, where a drone comes to scan you an you discover your fate.

I think our biggest lesson learned is just how fast time flies in a jam. We had BIG plans for story development but in the end it didn’t make it in. We all learned a lot about working with the Vive and how user interfaces change in VR. I’m sure our next VR endeavor will be better for it. If you want to check out the environment and you have a vive, go ahead and download the demo. Thanks!