Rodent Rumble

To quickly explain the Tilt Five; it's a gameboard, a mixed reality headset, as well as a "Wand". The gameboard is highly reflective, and the headset projects light onto it, and that light then gets reflected directly back towards the wearer, giving them a unique viewpoint from the headset. Interestingly the light is also slightly visible when standing behind someone with the headset on. We got 4 of the headsets and wands, and one board, and we were tasked with making a quick and fun multiplayer experience using these tools, and end up with an analysis of the potential functionality for Enversed.

The most pressing thing to get done was snapping the cheese to the wand. The first go I had at it was trying to parent the cheese to the wand object as it moves, but this felt very rigid and awkward, and caused some weird issues with clipping through the floor, so the thing I ended up settling with was to apply force to the cheese in the direction of the wand, relative to the distance the wand is removed from the cheese, which also caused some weird issue because of physics, but these issues were solved by calling them funny, and adding some invisible walls and fail saves for any issues that were truly game breaking. I didn't record any of that though so here's the cheese snapping to the pen instead.

One of my teammates had created some AI for the mice, but since we now had three different types of cheese, and since the AI felt weirdly sensitive and insensitive at the same time, I felt the need to completely rework it. I ended up making a collider around the mouse in the shape of a cylinder, and giving the mouse pathfinding to any cheese that's inside of the collider, and then there's another collider directly in front of the mouse that makes them take a bite out of the cheese, locking them onto that cheese if it's still there, as well as changing the cheese state.

The goal for the players is to lead them into their pens, and as soon as there's one in there, and a piece of cheese is inside that pen, it is considered in that pen, and will slowly eat away at the cheese. Once the cheese has been eaten, they go through one more cycle of bite taking, and if there is no cheese to bite, they leave, so the players have to resupply the mice they already have with cheese as they try to lure in the remaining ones.

As the game goes on, cheese is infinitely randomly spawned at a set interval, and mice are spawned in a set pattern, up to a limit of 17 in total; exactly enough for there to be 4 mice in each pen, with only one mouse remaining that the players can fight over. As soon as any of the players have 5 mice in their pen, they've won, and the mice in the pens get transported to the middle of the board on a victory screen of sorts. The winner's platform is elevated and rewarded with a crown. There are also big reset cubes on the side that allow the players to play another round.

After testing the game a bit with people that don't play games all too often, I learned there was a lot that the game still needed to explain, so I made a little tutorial section that's played before the game begins, using animated holograms that I created myself, to show the player what to do. This teaches the player how to pick up cheese, teaches them to lure the mice into their pens using the cheese, and to then drop the cheese into the pen to keep them there. It doesn't teach them about resupplying them with cheese, but players were quick to pick up on that as the game was going.

After the client was happily surprised with how well the game turned out in the end, we got to present it at a public event called the Dutch Design Week, and the game got almost constant attention in the two days I was there - there were quite a few groups that wanted to play the game several times in a row because they were having so much fun with it, which was really great to see as one of the people who made it. On the first day one of my other teammates was there, though I did most of the beckoning and the explaining, and on the second day I was there on my own, which was a bit more troublesome, but still very nice.