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blueware.xtomc.at

Inspiration

We were inspired by games such as Ultimate Custom Night, completing mini games and things to progress, and generally by the Frutiger aero/old windows versions aesthetic.

What it does

To play the game, you interact with a virtual operating system on a 3d monitor. You start by logging in, and see an email from your boss explaining the situation. You need to perform a bunch of mundane and annoying tasks on the OS, while loads of nonsensical pop-ups appear on your screen to distract you. Your aim is to solve the millennium bug before it wipes out every computer in the world!

There's lots of cool features - we spent lots of time making the aesthetic look convincing and generally polished. For instance, we built a system for rendering arbitrary scenes in windows, and rendering our 2d OS viewport onto the 3d monitor.

How we built it

We built the project using Godot and GDscript, as this allowed us to iterate very quickly. The 3d scene was constructed in Blender.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was using git with Godot. We're a team of four, and it seemed as though on every commit/pull there was some sort of merge conflict. We had to put a lot of work into merging and generally coordinating our commits and pulls to reduce friction.

Another major challenge was getting the 3d rendering working with the 2d viewport. We spent a long time trying to get the 2d mouse to properly interact with the curved 3d screen. Our final solution was using a raycast from the camera onto the screen mesh and measuring the intersection to determine the clicked 2d coordinate.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're super proud of the visual style we achieved. We think it's coherent and polished, and the way the 2d OS renders in the 3d environment looks really cool. We made lots of use of shaders, for example, to make the screen look like a real CRT monitor - you can see the light refract on the edges of the screen. We also created a custom Godot theme to ensure all the elements in the OS environment looked consistent without any additional work. Also, we're proud of the window management system we created, which allows windows to be dragged, resized, minimised, etc.

What we learned

Git is really annoying to use with Godot! If we were to do this again, we would want to find a better solution for collaboration.

What's next for Blueware OS

We want to finish the game! We were only able to implement some of the steps to completing the game, as each one was quite time consuming to do. We want to add more QuickTime events like the pop-ups, and allow the game to be won. We also want to add a score feature, so different players can compare notes.