Moped Mayhem Trailer/Demonstration
During my second semester of college, I decided to look out for opportunities with clubs and research and whatnot, and discovered that UF previously had a club called Gator VR which had been popular a few years before I came to the school. However as all of the officers were seniors, they graduated out and no one took over the club, thus it went under for a few years. I took this opportunity to refound the club, working with a staff member at the Digital Worlds college, and was able to get the club set up over winter break. Now, after a first rough semester, we have numerous members and 2 project development teams working on bigger projects that I will surely write about in later posts. However this summer a few large Youtubers, Valem, VR with Andrew, and Justin P Barnett hosted the 2023 VR Game Jam on itch.io. So I offered this opportunity to the members of my club and a bunch of us signed on. In the end when the time came, 3 of us ended up working on it. The jam lasted from June 23rd to June 30th, 7 days to put together an entire working VR game.
The Theme
Special Delivery
At first we had a dozen or so ideas, including:
- Gift package falling from sky
- Pizza time, spiderman delivery pizza
- Portal delivery service (like portal with puzzles and everything)
- Car chase game
- Combat game protecting pizza box/gift/uber eats bag in offhand while fighting to make the delivery
And our brainstorming page began to fill up. And then I started thinking of an old game I used to play on Roblox.
Final Idea
We finally decided on a Moped based pizza delivery game, with a Subway Surfers vibe. The premise was almost simple, a procedurally generating cityscape map with obstacles, with the player “delivering pizzas’ by making it to the end of the route without hitting an obstacle or being caught by the enemy chasing the player.
Then we stylized it a bit, adding music, voices and we turned the following enemy into a gang of the Ghost Mafia, trying to steal the pizzas from the player.
My Part
Then came the fun part; 3D Modeling a moped and creating the proper interactables to allow our player to easily control it in a realistic way.
This moped became my most prized 3D Model. I did the entire model in Fusion 360 before bringing it into unity to apply materials. The model took me almost the entire first day of the jam. The next day I spent working on the actual controls. Which without going into too much detail, is a modified version of the wheel from the interaction toolkit provided by Unity and Valem. The wheel let you guide the car and then turn. It even worked going backward.
This moped movement was my main focus during the jam, ensuring the model looked right and drove properly, feeling like a real moped. However I also handled all of the scene management, and did some other art for the game including the menu scene garage, the ghosts, and the other cars on the road.
And then I did all of the voice lines.
This was by far my favorite part of the game. I recently got a new microphone for zoom calls and online learning, as well as just simple discord use, and I really wanted to test it out. It came with built in effects that I could modify a bit and so I used it to record all of the voice lines in the game. I am the Ghost Mafia, the Pizzeria owner, the Moped Engine, the Car Honks, and the Random City Ambiance Voices. Some of my favorite lines included:
This was my first time ever voice acting or trying to create sound effects, and I really had fun with it.
My Team
The three of us, Keith, Landon and I worked on this project for the entirety of the 7 days.
Landon’s focus was on the procedurally generating map, he wrote the script that built the map each time as well as moving the ghosts and cars on the road. Alongside this he made a map system that worked as a display on the phone built into the mopeds handlebars. The map showed where you were, your next turn, and the ghosts following you. Landon had the most experience with procedural generation so we left that portion to him, helping where we could.
Keith did all of the building models:
He also wrote some of the other scripts in the project and put together the theme song with some help from an AI. However he also saved our entire project numerous times when we had problems with merge conflicts and other GitHub issues as he was the only one who understood how all that worked.
Struggles
Overall this project was a blast, however we did run into a few obstacles that we needed to overcome. First of all being the moped movement. We went through three different renditions of movement before we settled on the current method.
The second main struggle we had was building the project for the Oculus Quest console. Over time we realized our game was getting increasingly larger, running numerous scripts at once and generating the entire map, and so I wanted to test the build process for the Oculus. It just kept crashing. We had no idea what to do, until one night I realized we were working in the Universal Render Pipeline, a system for rendering graphics built into Unity that is built for rendering high resolution games. So I spent the night switching our game over to the standard pipeline, fixing all of our materials that had been built with the old shader. After that we were able to finally load the game on the headset and begin testing it properly.
Conclusion
This project was a great experience, and aside from my first game jam, and a few older lost prototype projects, this was my first full game, start to finish, with a menu, levels and replay capability. Its a great arcade game, endlessly playable if you get used to the motion sickness.
You can check out our submission here: https://itch.io/jam/vr-jam-2023/rate/2142257
And everyone else’s who participated here: https://itch.io/jam/vr-jam-2023/entries