This past weekend (31st January to 2nd February) the GameDev Técnico team participated in Global Game Jam 2020.

I'm sure most of you know what it is, but essentially, the Global Game Jam is the world's largest game jam event (game creation) taking place around the world at physical locations. Think of it as a hackathon focused on game development where participants have 48 hours to create a game with a specific theme.

While part of the team at GameDev Técnico loves to and has participated in several different jams, this was our first jam as a team and thus it was quite exciting, as you can see in the picture below (some more than others).

We participated in the Global Game Jam in the Técnico/Belas-Artes site, here in Lisbon. The jam started in 31st of January when the theme was announced, roughly at 6 pm. Once that happened we quickly delved into what I think is one of the best part of the jams, the idea of the game.

Before the jam started we already had the intention of using Augmented Reality. We felt that the jam was the perfect place to both learn and explore a little bit of the technology. Additionally, one of the sponsors of the jam site was a company called ONTOP studios, a Portuguese studio focused on making games and applications with AR. If we could use their knowledge about the technology (and some equipment) it would make it easier for us to learn and create something great.

Finally, from the perspective of newly founded club it is also of great interest to us to gather some spotlight and notoriety, developing games using “attention-grabbing” technologies is one of the easiest ways to do that.

The theme of the jam was "Repair", awful I know, it always is, fortunately the theme is not a hard constraint as there are many ways to interpret it. After some brainstorming we decided to make a game around players having a tower, and having to rebuilt it. Once we knew what we wanted to do had to answer several different questions:

• How do players repair their towers
• Should we add multiplayer (make players' towers fight each other)
• Should we let players upgrade their towers
• What is the overall gameplay loop
• Are players simply using their phones as a window to the other world
• Essentially why are we even using AR?

Surprisingly we found the solution to most, if not all, of these problems in the definition of Augmented Reality.

One of the most important lessons we took from this jam was something the ONTOP people told us. Essentially, most developers use AR as a means to take users to an alternate reality, they don't make use of the real world around the player.

“Augmented Reality is two words, use the Augmented sure, but don't forget to use the Reality part of it. Use the real environment around the player in your game, if the player is in a library use the books, if the player is outside use the trees..."

If the interesting part of Augmented Reality is its connection to the real world, why not use it as a game mechanic.

Once we were all on that same mindset we started coming up with lots of ideas, some wilder than others, some we might even use in future projects. Finally we decided that we wanted players to have their own tower and search around in the real world for “resources” in order to add levels to their it, while competing with others.

What were those resources? Colours of course!

Augmented Reality is constantly using the phone's camera, if we could detect the dominant colour of each frame we can use that as a resource and add it to that player's tower. Additionally, as the theme of the jam is “Repair” what if players had to rebuild their tower in a particular colour sequence.

And so RGBuilder was born.

Basic gameplay Loop:

1. The game starts and Player have to look at their tower and try to remember its colour sequence. After 15 seconds that tower is “erased” and only its base remains.
2. The player must then run around the real world and take pictures of objects with the desired colour.
3. To add a coloured level to the tower they must move in close and point towards it in order to “build” that level. The colour is then added to the tower, even if incorrect.
4. Once the time runs out the Player with the most correct and longest sequence wins.

As if this wasn't a hard enough challenge to implement we decided to add multiplayer as it sounded more fun if players were competing against each other. This adds the mechanic where you can add colours to the others' towers which might help or hinder their game. It also allows players to mess with other towers and potentially screw up other players' sequences.

By Friday evening, late late evening, we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do, a Competitive Multiplayer Augmented Reality game. Great! Now, can we do it in 48 hours? and, Will it be fun to play?

We would soon find out that, no, we couldn't do it under 48 hours, however, yes it is pretty fun to play, even with a basic-barely-working-prototype.

More blog posts will come soon regarding this project and its implementation during GGJ, I will for sure write about the colour detection techniques we used as I'd love to get some feedback about it. Other members will also share details about multiplayer and AR itself.

Follow us on our Social Media channels to learn more about RGBuilder and GameDevTécnico on:
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

Thank you for reading,

Manuel Guimarães