Lost in Transmission

Friday
Over the past weekend the Global Game Jam took place. We went to the Jam Site at Rotkreuz where the HSLU hosted the Event. Initially we thought about creating a team of 3 without too much ambitions since we had exams throughout the following week, starting on monday. During the team formation another jamer (Zoe Roellin) joined our team and we brainstormed for a while. We set up the Project and made sure everyone had their software up to date. The idea was more or less chosen and we went home to let the idea set for a while.
Saturday
The following day we developed the fundamental mechanics of the game and then set up a vr modelling station for Zoe. I think during that time we somehow thanks to Zoe developed the idea about a coop play with a buddy using vr. Zoe (as I later found out) visited the same workshop as I where we used A-Frame for a 3d Scene with webVR. The coop limitation here was the crux of the matter. We didn’t want to get into unity multiplayer for the jam. We took the inspiration from keep talking and nobody explodes where you can get a pdf from the website. And so the multiplayer limitation was chosen. There was no connection between the two players except talking which we developed into the fundamental game theme. Transmission was the theme of the ggj and with the coop part set we had that covered. Zoe stayed the night and worked on the isle theme.

Sunday
Sunday was levelbuilding day. Also the VR part was finally beeing pushed. We started to fix the level in multiple copies of the map and later copy pasted the changes into the actual map. However we still managed to get Git conflicts that we had to resolve. The story for the isle hadn’t been fixed completely and Zoe went to draw all the intro and outro images in one long session. The story got together quite nicely with the images. How to get the images into the game and how to finish the VR part was not made until late that day. It was one big last push that finished those parts and we completed the game just in time.

All in all it was a lot of fun and almost zero stress. I am glad it turned out that way and I am quite surprised how much we managed to create in this short amount of time. I believe we created the first vr/classic game coop in switzerland.

The Game
Lost in Transmission is a two-player game. One player plays the game on their pc or mac, while the other uses their phone to access our Web VR page: https://lostintransmission.thecell.eu/ Trapped on a mysterious island full of riddles and puzzles, the players will soon discover that they are both working with incomplete information and need to communicate in order to escape.

Global Game Jam Link
The WebVR part (can be viewed in a browser aswell)

Media