GLOBAL GAME JAM 2020 : VROOM VROOM TACO
About the Game
VRoom VRoom TACO (VVT) is a VR game where the player is tasked with serving orders from a taco truck. The player is able to grab ingredients, including lettuce, cheese, and beef, and combine them with taco shells to complete the orders given to them. However, because GGJ2020’s theme was “Repair”, the player must also be aware of things that will break in the truck. The player will be required to put out fires and replace broken components of the truck while they try to complete as many orders as possible.
VVT is compatible with Oculus VR devices, including the Quest.
About the Experience
Being one of the more experienced Computer Science students on an all-student team, I worked on VVT from a more managerial role. This was an interesting experience, as I saw how quickly I was losing time where I could be writing code to helping teammates or directing the project. This reflected what I had seen so far with my internship at Imangi Studios, where people could spend over half an entire workday in meetings to ensure everything on a project is running smoothly.
GLOBAL GAME JAM 2019 : Already Forgotten
About the Game
The theme for this year’s game jam was “What does ‘Home’ mean to you?” In our game “Already Forgotten", my team and I wanted to explore the idea of how a home can be shaped by the items contained in it. While we had a sister team working on a game about using items to remember fond memories, we decided to take our game the opposite direction. Our game tells the story of a person shortly after a breakup with their significant other. After returning home, this person decides to collect all items associated with that person and destroy them. As each item is picked up, the memory associated with it is printed out to the screen, representing the memory being relived one last time before the item is thrown away.
About the Experience
This game jam was my first ever, and it was an incredible experience. I participated at my local on-site location, which happened to be at Imangi Studios. So not only did I get to code video games for 48 hours, I got to do so while interacting with real game developers and working in an actual game studio! (Pretty cool, right?). There were over 30 people in attendance, so the event leaders helped to create teams by having us toss out and and then deciding on a handful to focus on. This made it easy for me to find 4 other participants with similar ideas for a game, and we immediately set to work.
My favorite part of working on this project was how my team streamlined production through specific roles. Although each of us came from a software background, we were still able to quickly identify each person’s strengths and weaknesses to assign tasks accordingly. For example I, being no artist nor musician, had the tasks to programming character animations, movement, item interaction, and in-game audio players. I enjoyed this because it was so different from the group projects I do in school, where everyone has a hand or part in every piece of the final project. With this game jam, my defined role allowed me to easily find my next task after completing one, and in the end product I can easily point out where I had contributed. (This was also my first time working in Unity! Daunting at first, but I quickly fell in love with the ease of the editor and the versatility of C# scripting)
It was also really incredible to see the game take shape as each person showed their own special skills. It made me realize that one of my favorite parts of video game development is getting to work with diverse people see everyone put forth their skills to create something we all care about. I felt this every time someone would finish an audio piece, a new sprite, or an entire room of the game map. I would just be filled with excitement at getting to put it into our video game! In this way, it made “Already Forgotten” that much more special because you could see how each person had enhanced the game in some way, and by the end of the weekend I was very proud of what we had put together.