The Vogglers
The Vogglers
Project Team
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Supervision |
Goal
The goal of the Global Game Jam 2019 (GGJ19) at the Informatikum was for participants to try out new technologies and roles and test their ability to create a game in 48 hours. It is meant to be a weekend full of creativity, challenge and new experiences. All of this is done in the spirit of collaboration - testing and supporting each other’s games is definitely part of the fun. The theme for this years GGJ19 was “What home means to you”. In our location at the HCI lab of the Informatikum we additionally decided to only work on virtual reality games, to make full use of all the available hardware. So there we were, many of us first timers at a game jam, with the daunting task of developing a VR game in only 2 days. The challenge was on!
Let us begin by telling you the story of the game we wanted to create: "I bet you still remember the times, when you had to clean up your room as a child. Not always fun. Especially when it wasn't even your fault that the room is messy! It wasn’t your fault, but nobody knew that. Obviously, it was your little roommates’ fault! Cute, white and floating around. You called them Vogglers. Sadly, nobody but you could see them - certainly not your parents. Love is tough. And when your little friends had their "crazy 5 minutes" it was your job to avoid a catastrophe. For if your parents would see your room in such a state… they would never believe your story."
Approach
We spent the first three hours working out a game idea. We brainstormed and discussed a lot and liked the idea of a little poltergeist messing up the house. After all, home is not just fun all the time. It takes work as well. From the poltergeist it was only a few more steps until we reached a concept we were all excited about: our little Vogglers. Afterwards it was time to turn our ideas into something real. We approached our task to create the game on two different routes. We split into one design team and one coding/technology team, according to our skills and interests. Everyone could choose which aspect they were the most interested in, after all the Game Jam is about trying out new things and learning by doing.
Graphics and Game Design
Pixel graphics - that's what we wanted for our game. Considering the amount of time we had and the goal to produce a game which looked at least decent, if not pretty, it seemed to be the perfect choice. To create pixel art models we used the program MagicaVoxel. Working with this software is quite intuitive. Therefore, it wasn't too time consuming to get into it. First the little "ghosts" had to be designed. In this creative process a little figure came to life. The whole concept of little creatures living in your own house was strongly inspired by the "Mucklas" appearing in the childrens’ books "Pettersson und Findus". Once the little creature was designed, it became apparent that this little guy had to be called a Voggla – you might notice the little wordplay we did there. And just like that, the Vogglers were born. Afterwards a lot of models for furniture and decorations were created and exported as objects to Unity. In there the child's room came to live and all pieces were put together.
Your cute little roommate: The Voggla
Hardware and Coding
Simultaneously, the coding team set up the hardware and tried to get everything to work. That took a lot of time. When the hardware finally did what it was supposed to do (especially the tracking of the controllers), the real coding challenge started. We needed to implement several mechanics for our game:
- finding a goal (a random object in the room)
- random spawning of the Vogglers
- a scoring system
- controller mapping
- snapping - objects needed to return to their orginal places
- scene loading
Unity did us the favour of taking care of falling objects by letting us work with their physics. All these aspects had to be put together in a final effort. And except for the scoring system everything worked more or less as intended. (You can see the “Insert Score” line in the gameplay video, a remnant of the last crunch before the deadline).
The player spawns in this cozy and beautiful room with nice furniture
The room of our game. every object, e.g. the globe, could be pushed around by the Vogglers
Evaluation
At the end of the Game Jam we were all exhausted but very happy with our result. We received a lot of positive feedback, which felt surprisingly good. We are even considering to return to the world of the Vogglers in the future to smooth out some issues that were still in the game. In hindsight, we could have saved some time by dealing with certain issues differently. For example, we had a lot of trouble making git work for us and lost several manhours trying to resolve these. It might have made more sense to just call it quits on that way earlier and use different methods of collaborative working, like we did in the end. Other issues that cost us a lot of time were related to the hardware we used. We decided against using the Oculus Rift or the Vive and ended up with a rather unknown pair of VR goggles. Perhaps using another model could have made setting everything up easier, but we cannot say that for sure. Trying out new things is always fun in itself, so it might have been worth it despite the trouble. Gameplay-wise there are still a few rough spots. The snapping of objects to their places can be a bit glitchy sometimes and the end of the game doesn’t work out as we had planned it. Also, it would be cool for players to see their score at the end of a hectic cleaning round. Overall, we are fairly proud of our gameplay idea. We had a lot of fun playing it and other testers seemed to be just as charmed by the Vogglers. The music "In The Hall Of The Mountain King" created a hectic atmosphere that supported the pacing of the game and made the players sweat. We also received compliments on the artstyle and the handcrafted 3D models and consider that to be one of our game’s strong points. All in all, our first Game Jam was a full success. We had just the right amount of stress, perhaps a bit too little sleep and a good amount of laughs. All of us learned new tools and techniques that might come in handy in the future.
The namesakes of our game: The Vogglers
Technology Details
Built with Unity, MagicaVoxel and SteamVR - Supports OpenVR, deleoped for Dell Visor & Controllers - Uses floor texture from the Unity Asset Store (20 Man Made Ground Materials by Angry Ant Entertainment - FREE)
Platforms: MS Windows
Tools and technologies: Unity
Special Thanks
... to MagicaVoxel for creating free & fun to use software
... Angry Ant Entertainment for their free asset "20 Man Made Ground Materials"
... nextReality.Hamburg for sponsoring breakfast & dinner
GGJ site: https://globalgamejam.org/2019/games/vogglers