Rubbish

(VR Experience)

Global game jam 2020

This project is in my portfolio because I believe is one of the most challenging products one can ever attempt. We had 3 days to develop an idea for a video game, based on a concept given by the organizers, and then develop it and publish it at the end of those three days.

Getting to the idea

My team and I started to do some brainstorming. We had two developers, one modeler and one game designer and UX designer (me.)

We started developing ideas with an exercise of word networking, so we started with "To heal" that was the topic of the Game Jam, and we proceeded to enhance that concept.

Let's make rubbish

We decided to make a game using the ideas to save and pick up garbage. So we landed on the concept: You are in a boat and you have an harpoon to get cans and more garbage. You also have a net because the river you are at has fish on it and they have to be saved. So the narrative was there:

You are trying to save the wild life of a river that has been polluted, so at the same time that you have to pick up garbage, you must save any animal friend that swims there oblivious to what have happened. How do we call it?

Rubbish VR. Word for trash, kind of fun to say, it is already a established expression. Easy to remember.

How to play

We agreed that a good way to not confuse the user, remembering a VR environment is an affordances canvas. So the player would have only two options, either to pick up the trash when using the right hand, and to save a fish, using the left hand. In the virtual environment, the user would see an harpoon and a net.

So we reduced it to the simplest instructions we could: You are going to have fish and rubbish. Stave the rubbish, pick up the fish. One of your hands is going to have an harpoon and the other one will have the net. So the user could easily identify which affordance did what.

We kept it simple because at this point of the day, it was Friday night and we had to deliver this project on Sunday noon. So we had the game play figured out also: The user would have to tour around a river and a song would play in the background. The speed and the pace of the elements appearing (trash and fish) would be delimited by the music.

The River

Our talented modeler Daphne downloaded an environment from the Unity Store and she did some modifications to it so we were able to use it for our game. It had to be circular so it would be cyclical. She also modeled a fish and a can so we could have our elements ready to go. She spent all night doing this, as I discussed the goal of the game with my friend and developer Kevin.

WhatsApp Video 2020-02-02 at 03.13.24.mp4

The Game

At the end of the three days we came up with a delivery that was much fun to play with! It goes without saying that we had a blast developing this game and that we had some (plenty) of technical issues.

The game we planned was different from the game we delivered but that is just the way it goes, even with a great team, the design for the product and the product itself end up being two different things.

Since we worked hard on this it would make me happy to show a little bit more of the work and the ideas we had for this particular game.