Pistöl Shrimp VR

Description

Explore the life of a pistol shrimp in a “doomed” underwater world

At our jam location in Bayreuth (now the biggest jam site in southern germany) we won the second place in the categories “best game”, “best game design”, “best sound” and “best 3d art”.

For this Global Game Jam my personal goal was to make a game in VR using the motion controls. I had no particular idea in mind, but wanted to get my hands dirty with the tech and design of such a game. The theme of this years Global Game Jam was “Waves”. While our team had a lot of different ideas in the brainstorming session, we quickly settled on the idea of being a pistol shrimp after researching it a bit. It really is an awesome animal.

In this game you control it with the HTC Vive. You use your claws to attack. With the left claw you can grab things, while you use the right claw to shoot shockwaves which knock back everything in their vicinity. The goal is to stay alive by eating the different fish in the game and using the shockwaves to manipulate the environment in your favor. The game has three different types of fish with different interactions, which influence each other dynamically.

This was my first time working with the HTC Vive, but I was very quickly able to grasp the core concepts of it. In the team I focused on having a overview of the game design, planning and doing the core programming tasks. I started working with the core mechanics (the claws) and always tested a feature in VR after I completed it. After I was pleased with the result I asked one or more of my teammates to test it and balanced it accordingly in Unity. We had a good time and the game was well received by the people trying it out during the jam.

Sadly, we could not implement all envisioned features and finalize the balancing because the organizers needed the equipment back earlier than we thought.

Credits:

All: Game Design
Philipp Haderdauer: Programming
Andre Lautner: Audio
Sebastian Reuther: Programming, 3D Art
Thomas Terebesi: 3D Art

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