Global Game Jam 2018

By | February 1, 2018

For this year’s Global Game Jam, both PG and me were participating. We decided to try somewhere close by, and fortunately Unity was hosting a jam in its office in Bellevue.

I did not plan to work on VR this time, but Jamie, a lady developer I worked with for Seattle Game Jam brought Acer Microsoft Mixed Reality system with her. That perked my interest, since I have never try to build for that device. PG decided to join in as well.

This year’s theme was transmission. We decided to create a first person puzzle experience where player transmits code to certain robots in a lab to open locks and escape. As usual, I was the only artist in the team, and made most all assets from scratch to ensure low poly.

Although some of us were already familiar with VR, building it for Microsoft VR system was a first for all of us. In the beginning we weren’t sure what to do. Fortunately, as we were jamming in Unity site, we had a lot of on-site support. We even had a Microsoft/Unity evangelist from SoCal with us, who was familiar with building app for this VR system. The world sure is small, since the same person was also the same one who organized Orange County Unity Group while we were still in SoCal. Through him, we learned that we had to use unreleased, beta version of Unity 2017.2.0p2-MRTP5 that support this system. Since none of the programmers worked with VR much, we decided to use existing toolkit like VRTK and NewtonVR as a base and work from there.

Overall, it was a really good experience trying to build for a new system. We had some issue creating a build, since Microsoft store accepted a Visual Studio solution instead of executable file.  Not until we were finished with our project that I learned how to create executable build, from one of the visitor who also have built for this system.  Oh, also to note, Unity fed us really well. And all the help available when we were stuck. Thank you, Unity.

You can find about 30 Seconds Robot Charmer on GGJ site and itch.io.