Fungi
Friday 9/22 was the Create-A-Thon. Hosted by the BADAS Society at UF, the Create-A-Thon was a 12 hour event where participants were to create a piece of art in any media chosen. My idea was to challenge myself to build an entire VR game in a mere 12 hours, and after 12 hours of development, 24 hours of being awake, my first ever all-nighter, like 5 cups of coffee and my first energy drink ever I was pretty proud of what I produced.

The Theme:
So I heard about this event like 2 weeks in advance, and to be honest, I cared very little about the theme. My game idea came from a stupid pun I made in class along side a few ideas I had been working on in my head for a few weeks. So in the end I found some way to work this into my game.
However, the theme given to us at the jam was “You Can’t See Everything”.
The Process:
So this entire game development process was heavily fueled by caffeine and my ADHD thus I was all over the place. I started working on like three or four different parts of the game all at once, switching tabs like a madman. I started with models, menus, and then some game mechanics.
Models:
One of my goals for this assignment was to work in Maya a bit, as I’m using it in one of my classes and I’d like to become more familiar with the software. However, I ran into many road blocks, so only one of my important models came out of Maya, the others came from Fusion 360.
Fusion 360 Models:







Maya Model:

With Color:




Game Development:
So the plot of the game was simple. Your character is sitting at a campfire in the woods when the Fungi of the forest appears with a staff, introduces himself, and then runs off toward his home. The player can follow the fun guy and then wizard gives the player a staff and teaches them how to do magic! Now for this game I had a lot more planned. A few more spells, an enemy system and a ton of animations. However time quickly became an issue and working on my laptop was not helping. Thus I diminished the game to 2 spells and a simple practice area for the spells.
Starting with the campfire, I made this real easily, however it took me nearly 3 hours since I was working on so much all at once. I used the log model I created along with some rocks I made quickly in Maya and a few particle systems. I started this game using Valem’s VR Template, purely because I didn’t want to spend the 5 minutes creating a menu and a character who could interact with the menu. So my campfire sat in front of the menu and the title.

When the user hit the start button, the title and menu would shoot slowly into the sky and Fungi would appear at the opening to his path.
World Building
The level design was really basic for this project. I created one tree and then since it wasn’t one mesh, I had to place them manually around the terrain as prefabs. However, copy and paste came in handy, and the scene wasn’t too large, although I believe this definitely had a significant impact on the performance of my game. I also spent far too much time designing parts of the game I hard used. Fungi has a hut that the player walks to, and I fully furnished his home, even though the player will probably never enter the home. However the map came out well, just a simple forest with a heavy blue-ish fog effect that helped to mask the fact that the map was not very large and infinite.
Now I had planned to give Fungi a ton of animations, but I quickly realized Maya hated him and Unity’s animation system for 3D wouldn’t work without bones and an avatar. So homie mostly glides places, but he only moves once, and its very fast so the player doesn’t really have to take too much notice.
Magic System
My main focus for the game was the staff, which took me forever because I was having a real pain with building the project every time I wanted to test it since my laptop couldn’t run VR. So I used the dynamic attach point for the staff instead of a transform and the parenting system to keep the staff on the players hand so they wouldn’t drop it accidentally. I then created the mechanics for the magic using very simple scripts. The player can hold the trigger button on the hand holding the staff and a rock appears at the tip and slowly gets larger until the player releases the trigger and the rock flies forward. The second spell allows the player to hold the staff in one hand and the grip button on the other hand to create a shield at the tip of the wand formed from particles.
Audio
My favorite part of this game (as for most games so far), was the voice lines. For this game I desperately wanted to use an open source AI I found a few weeks ago that lets me create my own AI covers. Thus I could upload vocals and have them voiced by other famous people. So for this project I spoke in a funny accent and then used a voice model of Gandalf, to create an interesting voice for Fungi.
Original
With Gandalf:
I ended up having to sit in the bathroom, in the dark (the lights made loud noises) to record the audio clips. They weren’t perfect, but I loved the results.
Video
I ended up streaming the entire 12 hours of development, and so here I have condensed those 12 hours into like 2 and half minutes, using 32x speed.
Playthrough:
DLC:
I would love to continue working on this project. I feel like I could have done a lot more with it. My ideas for the future include:
- New spells
- Lightning
- Smoke
- Fireball
- Combat/Enemies
- Willow Wisps, little ghost dudes that try to attack Fungi’s home
- Models:
- Animal life like raccoons
- More tree varients
- More forest environment objects
Check it all out!
Here is the link to my project, along with the link to the other submissions for the event! i highly recommend you go check out everyone’s projects and play what’s playable.
Update:
After the displays and voting last night, 9/2, Fungi won the “Most Ambitious” superlative.
