T3G – where GameDevs are born in a virtual world
What is?
Trigamic Tournament (T3G) is a nationwide (Poland) initiative to introduce young people to a gamedev. The Tournament was co-organized by Teatrikon and the Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs. Together with Lublin GameDev, we had the pleasure to run some lectures and prepare The Final Tournaments.
Students were divided into three Cantons, and they were competing against each other: who will create a better game. The University of Gamism watched over the education and progress of newcomers.
Why?
The Tournament, like everything worldwide, received a significant setback. The pandemic caused it to go online and next to a virtual world.
The situation with COVID mode organizers to look for others, then the physical world, canvases to conduct training.
We knew, from the work for The Municipality of Lublin, that VRChat is the solution. The ready to use virtual world allows for creating private instances that only invited can use.
BEFORE THE PROJECT STARTED
The final phase of the Trigamic Tournament had three events, and each one needed a different set of assignments for students. Our job was creating instances of VRChat, preparing the events, and running them. So we needed: 3D graphic designers, game designers, game developers, and level designers. Of course, the QA should also have time to check everything. And some MCs during the events should do their job.
We estimated that the entire project would take around three months. Guess what? We didn’t have that much time. We have some experience in working under the pressure of time.
But with T3G, we needed to extrapolate a quarter from one month. We did the math. We have around eight working hours a day, but the entire day has three times more hours. So, according to our calculations, it was double.
Spoiler alert: we delivered it! As always! As requested! As always!
Of course, regular human beings would see “crunches”, and other issues like that. We have moments that we follow the most audacious like Elon Musk.
VRChat experiences in T3G
During the project
But, back to work – no more complaints.
Firstly, we needed to prepare 3D models with stylistics that will look like medieval castles. Of course, medieval in a modern way. We decided due to VRChat and resources of users to go low-poly.
With models, the devs started to work on preparing the virtual worlds. You know, the world – although virtual – need to act like a real one. No walking through walls, people, and teleportation only in places we needed.
Next, we needed to prepare the materials for students. The lecturers and assignments. Each week gave new live-streamed lessons after the students solved tasks. Oh boy, we had to use most of our neurons to prepare all the materials.
As always, there were some obstacles during development. With VRChats users capacity, with admin accounts to run the show or with video streams.
But, at the end of the month, we and T3G Final Phase were ready!
Conclusion
No one was harmed during the development of this assignment. We’re all rested now and returned to normal (our normal).
The first Trigamic Tournament is now history. The Final Gala took place, and the awards were given.
The T3G will have an extension in our projects. As you all know, The Arena by Reality Unit is live.
But, that’s the story for another time.
