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Forever Spaghetters
Spicy Boys
A VR date simulation game where you must feed your date spaghetti and kill cockroaches.
Game Design/Project Management/UX
For this GGJ, I wanted to develop a game for my HTC Vive for the first time. I built a team of talented individuals with that goal in mind and within that team my role primarily was to facilitate design discussions and develop a design plan that met our goals and would be within the scope of 48 hours. I created individual tasks for the team members and scheduled task deadlines to keep our project on the right track. Throughout production, I continued to analyze and shape the design so that we could get the most gameplay and polish out of what little resources and time we had. I'm very proud of the work I did on this project and we successfully executed a complete game loop that got an explosive reaction at the showcase at the end of the game jam at Sheridan College.
Challenges
This was the first time I had developed a VR game which posed challenges in design and management. Going into the game jam, I knew I wanted to develop for my HTC Vive so I built a team of individuals who I had worked with before and thought would work well together. Although a team of 9 is on the larger side especially for a game jam, I wanted to ensure that there were teams for design, tech and art so that challenges could be faced by a team rather than individually.
Another challenge we faced was designing a fun and executable game using the Vive headset and motion controllers within the 48 hours of the game jam. I have researched and played a variety of VR games and decided that within the small scope we had for development that we would focus on simple actions such as picking up and throwing objects and try to make those actions as compelling and scalable as possible. These simple physics based motions are fun and rewarding for the player and became the main focus for our design. Through facilitating design discussions with the team, we landed on an interesting enough setting to align the controls with. Once we got a skeleton game design, I created individual tasks for the members of the team to start development and continued fleshing out the rest of the design with the design team. This helped us manage scope because as the tech and art teams began developing, our design team could design the remaining systems and rules that frame the player actions into a game (challenges, progression, win and lose states, etc). I managed the progress of the project and organized the tasks into a priority lists for each member so they knew what they were working on next. As we reached milestones where we had playable builds, the entire team reviewed the state of the game and discussed how we wanted to move forward with the project. The development process for this project went so smoothly that not only did we get the game to a level of polish that we were hoping for, but a few members of the team participated in the Global Game Jam challenge where they created, and completed, another game in the last hour of the game jam.
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