🎮 Space Dungeon

Team

left to right

Premise

Space Dungeon is a 2 player cooperative virtual reality Unity game developed for the Global Game Jam 2018 event hosted at a Fishburners Brisbane AUS.

The objective of the game is to guide your virtually immersed friend through an alien spacecraft while avoiding invisible monsters.

Monsters can only be seen by the guiding player who views the position of all enemies on a minimap.

Links

• Source code in the Github repository
• Game screenshots on the Global Game Jam site

Reflection

This event was my first time participating in a game jam. My primary objective was to practice delivering playable content in a short span of time from start to finish. However I also wanted to meet some new friends, grow my network and sharpen my leadership & management skills. I was confident I could bring some useful industry experience to the table, and therefore was comfortable assuming a leadership position if I found the opportunity.

For me the event was a great success, in both social and technical areas.

I met a great bunch of people who kindly let me join their team early on in the game jam, and the group grew to 8 people during the first few hours. During the brainstorming session I co-facilitated the discussion with the help of Catherine Booth. I was conscious to ensure everyone’s ideas and opinions were heard, so that we could all be happy and excited to get started on the project for the next 48 hours.

On the technical side, we were able to get an HTC Vive setup all to ourselves for the entire weekend. Unfortunately none of us had ever touched VR development prior to the event, but it was too good of an opportunity to pass up, so we dove into a VR project anyway. I gladly took on the responsibility of all the VR setup and coding work. I additionally took on the responsibility of integrating everyone’s work, since none of the other technical guys had much experience with version control - I made sure to knowledge share where possible. Integration became challenging toward the end of the project.

From many past group project experiences, I operated under the assumption that we were going to run out of time. Wherever possible I tried to encourage the team to focus solely on the absolutely essential features, and leave the bells and whistles for later. My suspicions were correct, and during the crunch period I was running on very low sleep and was furiously trying to integrate everyone’s valuable efforts, right up until the deadline.

Results

Thankfully everyone’s work made it into the final product, and in the end we did have a complete, playable (albeit buggy) game, which was awesome. I will definitely be attending more game jams in the future. Unfortunately the game is not easily demo’d or playable at home unless you have a VR kit, but I am content in the belief that the knowledge I gained playing with the cutting edge VR tech was of a greater benefit than having a distributable product for this project.