Wave Rave

Global Game Jam 2017

Wave Rave was a small virtual-reality project built with friends made at the event for Global Game Jam 2017. The theme for the jam was "Waves," and we were given about 36 hours in order to make the game.

We kicked around a few ideas, but were set on doing a virtual reality project. Moreover, The Tilt Brush exporter for unity assets had just launched and so we also wanted to make our own assets in Tiltbrush. We finally settled on a tower-defense like game where one had to wave their arms to send out waves that destroy waves of enemies.

Yes, that's right. Waving your arms sends out waves that destroys waves of enemies.

The basics of the game were simple: Keep the enemies from reaching your base.

To play, you put on the HTC Vive headset and step into the control booth over the waveform generator. In front of you, you see two semi-circular tracks leading to your base. Soon enough, enemies start spawning, and you have to move three generators in positions along the tracks by grabbing them and setting them. If you grabbed one, and started waving your arm up and down, it would start to send out a wave that would destroy enemies on the track.

But, keeping true to waves, some enemies would resonate with the waves and get stronger instead of being destroyed. So you had to balance sending out the waves in the right directions to destroy the right enemies and not empower the wrong ones.

There were three types of waves you could control and send out: sinusoidal, square, and triangle waves. Each wave destroyed "Noise"-type enemies and enemies of the other types, but would empower enemies of the same shape and color.

There were three types of waves you could control and send out: sinusoidal, square, and triangle waves. Each wave destroyed "Noise"-type enemies and enemies of the other types, but would empower enemies of the same shape and color.

In the end, it was a fun type of game with a bunch of promise. It had a lot of bugs seeing as how we hacked it together so quickly, but it was a very interesting idea I'd like to return to in the future.