The Global Game Jam 2021 presentation for Zodiac Explorer VR!
If you thought that my introduction post was implying that I haven't been making things lately, you are incredibly wrong! I joined forces with a team of three Shawnee State alumni: my friend James Albracht (aka DebrisHauler, massive thanks to him for all of his wonderful YouTube videos... check him out there if you get the chance!) once again, Kory Byrnes as our resident music/sound wizard, and Nathan Schultz coming in with the ship model!
I'm incredibly proud of this project. At the time when we built this in January of 2021, OpenXR integration in the Unity engine was a brand-new thing. Given that we began our work on the Friday of the game jam weekend, I had the VR rig working with OpenXR and a quick-and-dirty approach to networking in Photon 2 worked out all in time for James and I to do our game concept presentation in VR on the first day of the jam inside of the project that we were developing. I enjoyed my entire time working on this project, but that was the moment where I remembered at long last how incredible it felt to do this kind of work. I almost lost my mind when we tested the setup and it was actually working!
The pitch presentation was recorded shortly after we tested the networking. We threw together some planes and slapped our concept images on them, we scale-tested the room which led to me walking into a wall, and presented our game idea without a script. The video shown below was played on the Shawnee State University jam site Twitch channel!
In space, no one could hear how many times I said "um"!
From there, I threw together some VR character controls, the ship movement, the network code, and some game logic. I also modeled the shell of the weapons system at the bow of the ship!
This bug was incredible... how could we not gif it?
After a long year of being stuck indoors, trying to keep up with my remote government job and my sanity, it meant the world to me to be a part of something like this again. Getting involved with my team members' various jam projects was a blast: James created a persistent spawning system for the various objects that could appear in space and helped me rethink the ship control logic, Kory had us critique his music and sound effects, and we watched Nathan put the finishing touches on the ship model over Discord.
It has been far too long since a software development effort made me smile so much. This was a turning point for me. January of 2021 was when I decided that I'd been out of the game career hunt for far too long. According to Gettysburg College, the average American adult spends about a third of their entire lives at work. That's somewhere around 90,000 hours! I'm still relatively early on in my career, but honestly, it's never to late to rethink how I spend that time. It's never too late to wonder why I'm not working a job that feels like this, while still respecting the worth of my time and the balance of a healthy life.
Same goes for you. Whatever your dreams, they're out there for you somewhere.
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