De-Rezzed

Posted 2013-06-25 15:57:34 by James

Last weekend was the wonderful PC and indie focused game show Rezzed at the Birmingham NEC. But we weren’t there to play other people’s games, we was there (as Opposable Games so often are) to jam. I took along recent Opposable coding hire (and no stranger to game jamming himself) Lukas Roper, freelance composer EduardoVC, and press-ganged my old friend Ross Mansfield from Ten24 - a fabulous 3D production crew based in Sheffield – into action.

Ross has done a nice write-up on the Ten24 blog here about the event, so I’ll skip that and go more in-depth into the game and the process.

We were making use of the Oculus Rift for the first time, so none of us really knew what to expect. Thankfully Oculus have done a great job of making integration of the device (particularly with Unity) really easy, so the potential technical challenges of getting the game up and running were not as great as they sometimes are with new hardware. Using the Rift dictated the game design to a large degree – a first person viewpoint was pretty much inevitable, and it needed to present the player with a large enough world that looking around was a benefit in gameplay terms. A first person running game, similar to Mirror’s Edge satisfied both those criteria to some degree, plus allowed us to explore the jam’s theme “The Eighties”.

Because of the incredibly short development time, there were areas of the original design that we didn’t have time for; most obviously, connected-screen play. Interestingly, most of the internals of the game were build to support it, so a second player could jump into the game on their tablet and move buildings around in the game world to assist or to thwart the player playing from first person. This kind of asymmetric play would be well suited to a commercial Oculus Rift title, where more traditional styles of multiplayer are rendered more difficult because of the necessities of the hardware. Sadly, the bell tolled just before we could get device discovery working. But if we have a chance to revisit the title, it will be the first thing we add.

Similarly, the game was originally designed as an endless runner, but for demonstration purposes we wanted a level layout that would be fun and interesting to play, and the potential pitfalls of doing procedurally generated content meant that we instead went with with a fixed level layout – the bonus of this of course is that we could include one of our favourite images of 80s icons Gary Coleman and The Hoff as a reward for players progressing far enough.

Neither of these omissions impacted the final reveal of the game, nor the fun we had making the game. For a large range of reasons (not least because it doesn’t really have a name) it’s unlikely that “The adventures of the 3D character from the Money for Nothing video” will ever surface as a fully-fledged project like some of our other jam games, but you can watch a video showing our presentation here (and if you have time, I urge you to watch the whole thing to see some of the other great teams and games that we were up against):