“Laughter”, an exploration of extreme anxiety.
Before LD32, I had just discovered the joys of photogrammetry using Autodesk 360 Recap and my DSLR, and the hosts of the event I attended for Ludum Dare 32 in Seattle (AtomJack) were offering an opportunity to use their Oculus DK2s for the jam. I knew I wanted to put these two things together, so I came up with a plan to form a team of my own to make an aesthetic/exploratory first person VR experience.
I encountered Pinktreeleaf who writes for games, and I thought that a writer and artist would make a great core team for the project. The 3D meshes I was making with photography and Recap made me think of memories, so I wanted to create a kind of 3D representation of someone’s brain where the photogrammetry models served as independent memories. I liked the idea of using photogrammetry models for a gamejam as well, because they sort of subvert the expectations most would have for 3D assets made in a weekend. Pinktreeleaf brainstormed the idea of having it be an experience from the perspective of someone who suffers from extreme anxiety, and as the project came together we decided the specific catalyst for the breakdown the game focuses on would be someone else’s laughter- thus the unconventional weapon tie-in.
We were not able to secure a dedicated programmer for the jam as such, so it was cemented that we would purely focus on narrative/aesthetic structure rather than traditional game mechanics. Thankfully, Evan Witt, who I worked with at my one previous gamejam experience, was in attendance and graciously signed on to do audio for our game, which is a huge part of the experience. Livio De La Cruz appeared as we were starting and joined us to work on game systems, setting up audio/music logic and various other components needed to get the game working, as well as collaborating on establishing the tone of the game’s narrative. We used UE4, which none of us were extremely fluent in but I had built up some experience with, in order to streamline the first person fundamentals and get access to a whole lot of features to make the game look and run great.
Overall the gamejam and our game “Laughter” went well. At a show and tell on the Monday after the jam many people got to try out “Laughter” with the Oculus and we got lots of good reactions. I loved getting to try out developing something for VR. We did have some headache-inducing(not literally, thankfully) problems with audio systems and a plugin not working with packaging the ue4 build (FMOD), but it was playable on my PC. Over the next couple days I re-did the audio systems stripping out the faulty plugin and polished up a pure PC FPS build for a wider audience to be able to play. This build does not have Oculus support in it as I do not actually own an Oculus and was not able to test out re-integrating it, but VR support will be added back to the project eventually. “Laughter” had what is perhaps the highest mark of success a gamejam game can have, which is that I’m excited to continue work on it and see where it goes from here! Project is here, submitted under Pinktreeleaf’s LD account:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=27800
Here’s a video, but if you have a decent PC and can download and try the game out, I’d recommend doing that first as the game is mostly about seeing the environment and the video has almost everything in the game in it.
The paintings in the game are by me, www.keeganorourke.com, though two of them you won’t find on my site as they’re works I made when I was in a phase of depression after graduating from college. It was sort of nice to be able to create a little home for them, actually. The texture information of the paintings is the only asset that was not created during the weekend, all the photogrammetry models I was running around and capturing with my DSLR and crunching down in Maya LT.