Spawn Garden

Get anyone to learn video games with you! Spawn Garden is an open-ended sandbox that guides anyone to become familiar with the basic control skills that most modern 3D video games use.

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Our Inspiration

We all have that experience of convincing our parents, friend, or partner to play video games with us only to watch them spend 5 minutes moving in one direction without realizing that they can move the mouse to look at the same time. With this frustration in mind, we decided to create a solution for anyone to play their favourite video game and build their confidence through encouraging words and fool-proof tutorials, increasing their game literacy.

What we learned

We are able to be a lot more familiar with project management. In the beginning, we were spending a lot of time in the ideation stage and realized that we needed to quickly move on to the development of our solution due to time constraints. This helps us learn valuable team management skills by communicating with task distribution and our expectations for the project.

One of the biggest lessons we learned was the importance of learning about ourselves and playing to our strengths. We were a team of 4 designers - We initially tried to see if we could incorporate a lot of the sponsor technologies, or learn new technologies, skills and methods to conform to what we were "supposed" to do at a hackathon. But in the end after several frustrations and frankly unsatisfactory concepts we returned to our strengths. We knew what we were passionate about, what we were good at - Storytelling, narrative, crafting rich and beautiful experiences. We were people who were very knowledgeable at Spline, at 3D modelling, at game design, at art and illustration and concept design. Bringing these skills and perspectives, in the way that is unique to our team is part of being original and part of innovating. We ended up creating something that we were really proud of.

How we built our project

We built our project through Spline, a web based 3d modelling tool and game engine that supports multiple web based 3D functions, including games. We started with research and empathy, trying to understand game literacy, why it was such a big problem and the people who could be helped with our design. To bring our project to life we went through a sort of pseudo game design process, starting with concept art sketches and storyboards, going through creating, finding and modelling assets, brainstorming the game narrative and We built our project mainly using Spline. We imbedded our design into Webflow and published it on to our personal domain which was acquired through GoDaddy Registry.

Challenges we faced

Spline learning curve In the beginning, there was a learning curve involved in integrating the features of our video game. We had to figure out how to design for the first-person perspective and find out how to make the view of some controls and buttons have fixed positions. Spline is a relatively lightweight software, and we had to figure out how to push the scale, functionality and capabilities of the software, figuring out solutions in the end that we didn’t know were possible to hack through to a solution. In the end, we figured out how to push the software to support our needs.

Empathizing with non-gamers as gamers One of the biggest challenges we faced was empathizing with a demographic that was totally different from ourselves. We are all gamers and we are all pretty literate when it comes to videogames - It’s difficult to empathize to those who do not have these skills because we may consider them to be so basic. But in reality they are anything but, and challenging these assumptions and truly seeing through the eyes of someone else was a challenge. We overcame this through good research and looking at other people’s stories, seeking to understand the medium through their eyes and in their contexts, using analogies with other forms of literacy such as media literacy and language literacy to help us understand.

While ideating and designing the features of our solution, we were required to empathize with a demographic who has never experienced video games while being video gamers ourselves.

Software crashing The final stages of our project involved our software crashing and lagging as we add and duplicate animations, assets, and events. As we have four people working on the project at the same time, the software requires additional time to load and editing often becomes restricted. Additionally, the UI function on spline was fairly new, so we were not able to copy paste assets as easily as other functions.

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