Project Title: Olly Olly Oxen Free
Development: C# / Unity
My Role: Level / Content Designer, 3D Artist
Designer: Evan Schipellite
Artists: Evan Schipellite, Samantha Jean Ovitt
Programmers: Jake Ellenberg, Robert Bethune
Olly Olly Oxen Free was developed for the 2014 Global Game Jam, and therefore its production lasted about 48 hours. The game centers on the main character 'Evian' searching for his friends Danny, Ethan, Annie, Timmy, and Hannah. They have all gone into hiding, so the main character is attempting to find them by navigating through the surreal areas to uncover their locations and the nature of the location.
The development of the game was primarily an experiment for all members of the team, as it essentially had us all working within new tool-sets in order to create the core concept of the narrative. I, having never worked in Maya, let alone any other art tool-set, spent a portion of the 48 hours learning the basic of Maya modelling from scratch in order to quickly create a few basic 'believable' models for use. Other art components, along with the title screen, were created by Samantha Ovitt. Jake Ellenberg and Robert Bethune both worked on learning Unity physics and GUI features during the two day time-span.
As kids, how we perceived our surroundings was based in our upbringings. We had a different method of measuring time, and therefore we could have trouble understanding the changes in our world and the approaching future. Sometimes this mind-set, caught in the moment, could cause us to fail to acknowledge harsh truths. The main character of the game, unable to understand the disappearance of his friends, plays through a game of hide-and-seek in hopes that they will return. Despite the actual circumstance going on, he talks about them in the present tense, because for him, it doesn't make sense that they could just disappear. As kids, the world seemed to remain static, and the people surrounding you would never change. Therefore, for Evian, the only plausible reason for their absence is that they were simply hiding. Despite this notion, at the end of the game, his calls to telling them to 'come out of hiding' go unheard and his senses give way to how the world really is.
With that in mind, we designed the game to be simple and subtly misleading. Gameplay is mainly conducted by maneuvering through colored areas, riding buses to jump over walls, and interacting with hiding characters in the form of check-points. We wanted to engage the player in an environment that they probably could not fully understand. As they know little of the background of the main character's story, and because they may be unable to view the world from the child's perspective, we wanted emphasize the gap between Evian's personality and the player's. The world surrounding them and the comments made by Evian as the game progresses are designed to remind the player of the different set of lenses set before them. The world the player navigates through is filled with color and mystery, but the environment that Evian seems to respond to is one of confusion and loss.
While designing the game was a challenge in itself, a greater impediment emerged as we attempted to create a game that would invite us to learn and develop within new types of software. The art is in no way glamorous, but reflects the efforts of non-artists and programmers to quickly learn Maya and output assets for the game's narrative. The physics gameplay is iffy at best, but represents the work of members who had seldom touched Unity beforehand, and further pushed them to create a functional control scheme within the time limit. All in all, Olly Olly Oxen Free is a display of game developers working in unfamiliar environments in order to allow for a simple brainstormed concept to become reality in such a short time span.