Hello There

In this post I want to share some stories and thoughts from the XR GameJam which we, the Stork’Studios, attended recently (30-31.05.2024).

About XR GameJam

The premise of this GameJam was to make a XR/VR game. The event lasted approximately 30 hours (10:00 through 16:00 on the next day). There were multiple sites at which you could attend the jam which included:

• Helsinki XR Center
• Game Habitat’s DevHub at Malmo
• Poznan University of Technology
• DE:HIVE at Berlin

The onboarding consisted of two presentations. Firstly, Vladimir Rannik talked about practical tips when developing VR games. Then Anthony Vitillo made a speech concerning technical and business trends and insight of XR gaming. At the end the theme of the jam was announced: “Cooperation”.

But wait… aren’t you making Bullet Waste?

Well… yeah, but as you may know sometimes you need a break from your main project and a gamejam is perfect for that. You basically turn off your brain to anything that is not related to the jam. This, for some people, can be the time to relax as you aren’t worrying about anything. We also wanted to learn a thing or two about developing VR games, but I digress…

Our team

We went jamming with our somewhat standard team, but just before the jam our friend asked to join us. We, of course, agreed so our final team was:

• Adam "Gahlammon" Dachtera - graphics
• Daniel Wiechetek - graphics
• Helena Masłowska (the surprise guest) - graphics
• Piotr Oleksy - graphics
• Andrzej "Pojemnik" Gauza - programming
• Szymon Kaczmarek - programming

First steps

The “Cooperation” theme was quite a surprise. Not only we were supposed to make our first VR game without prior experience with such systems, but also to make a multiplayer game. We quickly came up with game concepts that would loosely connect to this cooperative aspect and avoided coding a 2nd player. We just knew that making a multiplayer game would end in a catastrophe. We had many ideas, some better and some worse:

• a driving game with many cars where the player needs to drive them all to the finish line
• a puzzle game where the player could duplicate themself
• a game that would record and replay player actions to overcome some obstacles
• a game with two rooms where one contains all the crucial information and the other has all of the controls

All of them had the same take on the cooperation - player cooperating with themself. And while the third idea may sound most insteresting, due to the time constraints and lack of experience with VR, we decided to continue with the last idea: a game where the player needs to go between two rooms and control some parameters.

The setting

We instantly came up with the game setting upon deciding on the game idea. The scuffed nuclear reactor seemed so funny at the time. We accelerated this feel by making the reactor room look like a flat in an old apartment block. The suspended ceiling, the pot plants, the supervisor that sound like he doesn’t care. It all contributed to the atmosphere. This is also reflected in our assets as a whole. We decided on low-poly models and “low quality” textures for the environment. We also added some visual noise to the control room in form of pc screens playing distracting gameplays. But it wasn’t all roses…

Is this the end, my only friend?

Around 5 hours in, Pojemnik (our programmer) said that he has trouble setting up the controls in Unity. The VR headset connected just fine but the buttons and hand tracking didn’t work. He tried many things, but they all failed. Finally, he said angrily “if this doesn’t work this time then I’m going home”. Of course, when he tried the thing it didn’t work. But he didn’t keep his promise and pushed forward. After some time he managed to fix the issue. It turned out that when using the Input System for Unity the VR controls are disabled by default. And there he was thinking that there was some nasty bug in the code. Talk about unlucky…

Let him cook

In the middle of the event, we had an unexpected guest. Pojemnik’s brother, Stachu, came to jam with us but in a different way. He brought his guitar and started recording some catchy riffs that we could use in the game. One caught my ear and I added a bass line and drums and put it in the game as the radio song.

The final hour

At that time we were mostly satisfied with our game. Of course the finishing touches needed to be done (e.g. the lighting was slightly bugged), but nevertheless, we have finished the project on time. Another funny story is that when building the game we realized that we hadn’t come up with the name. We had some ideas but we hadn’t decided on one. Somehow, from all of the possibilities, we picked the longest and the most inconvienient name to say - “My summer internship at a local nuclear reactor”. I think that it fits the game perfectcly.

And the winner is…

…not us. We ended tied for 2nd place. The winners were picked by everyone in a vote. The only games that were before us were two that required an actual second person (I guess that this is more cooperative than playing by yourself). Either way we’re happy with how our game turned out and if you have a VR headset I highly recommend playing our game. Have fun!