Space Jelly Commando

Space Jelly Commando is a VR game that utilizes the HTC Vive. Gameplay takes most, if not all of, its inspiration from the mobile game Spaceteam. Time pressure combined with the quirkily-named and confusingly-placed gadgets makes the gameplay experience chaotic and fun. Upon exiting a space warp, you find yourself facing imminent death as your spaceship careens toward a star. You must execute a confusing set of instructions by finding the appropriate gadgets and doo-dads in your cockpit in order to recharge your warp drive and escape safely from crashing into the sun!

Gameplay

Check out some of our first users play through the game!  

Design Process 

Having half our hackathon team be very design savvy served us well as we were able to spend the majority of Friday night ideating on possibilities and coming up with possible user flows. 

Once we had a user flow down and our possible buttons categorized and ranked by skill/challenge, we went to work figuring out the aesthetic of the game. We collaborated on a Space Jelly Pinterest board, adding possible spaceship control station panels and cute space images. 

Key Takeaways

• Hackathons are fun! - this was my first hackathon. I had the preconceived notion that hackathons were gross bro events where everyone becomes red bull crazed. This craziness certainly did happen to some teams but my team came out of it with a very fun functioning game and a great experience had by all. I am already signed up for more hackathons in the future and can’t wait!

• The Spirit Makes a Team - Originally, I felt a little left out when so many senior people were disregarding my skills at the Friday night Meet and Make a Team part of the hackathon but once our group of young newbies gravitated towards each other it made for a great bunch. We all came together just wanting to have some fun, learn something new and make something! None of us knew each other before and to this day are good friends. It was surprising to hear about how many teams had trouble working as a team on a project in such a short timeframe.

• GitHub is a Must - I am used to collaboration happening over the course of a couple of weeks in teams with just a few people so if there are any git merge conflicts we can easily resolve them. With a project at this speed - 24 hours - and with so many teammates operating, it was necessary to make sure everyone understood GitHub. I studied up before the hackathon with some udacity training of the basics so I could easily teach it to anyone who needed help. Even so, there were some merge problems with a project this large. It was still a good skill to bring to a design team for seamless integration of all our many assets.