GatorCampus 64

Marston Basement
Century Tower
Reitz Union
Malachowsky Hall Minigame

Inspiration

Every Gator knows the walk from Turlington to Marston, but nobody has ever triple-jumped it. We grew up on Super Mario 64 and wanted to explore our own campus with our friends: the real buildings at real scale, with our friends as the characters.

What it does

GatorCampus 64 is a co-op Super Mario 64 world set on the University of Florida campus. It runs on sm64coopdx, so Mario’s movement and online multiplayer are kept exactly as they are.

A real-scale campus:
- Plaza of the Americas and Century Tower serve as the hub.
- Five stages: The Swamp, the Reitz Union + Engineering quad, Lake Alice, Marston Science Library and Library West After Dark.
- The Reitz Union interior was rebuilt from 57 photos we took inside it, and the area around it has real elevation from USGS lidar.
16 solo and co-op missions, including a stadium stair sprint, a Gator Chomp Chorus rhythm game, a gator-riding regatta on Lake Alice and hide-and-seek in Library West.
Gatorize Me: upload 1–4 photos at gatorcamp.us. A Qwen vision model on a Vultr GPU reads your hair, colors and outfit, and Blender builds a playable N64-style gator of you. It deploys to our hosted server.
Gator Pass: type /login in the game, scan the QR code with your phone, and your account and character are linked through the Auth0 device flow.
Albert and Alberta, the mascots, answer questions in game through Gemini. Rival mascots (USF Bulls, FSU, UCF Knights) roam campus, along with a campus crowd and a minimap.
A live Field Board on DeepSpace shows leaderboards verified by the server.

How we built it

The world: OpenStreetMap data becomes Blender/Fast64 levels, which the game compiles at load time. Interiors come from UF floor plans and our own photos, and the terrain comes from a USGS 3DEP elevation model.
Characters: headless Blender scripts start from the official coopdx Mario template, which keeps every animation, and swap in the face, hair, outfit and accessories. A validator checks every export.
Gameplay: a Lua mission framework (acts, synced co-op state, HUD), plus an offline multi-client simulator with thousands of automated checks, so we could test without launching the game.
Online: a FastAPI service on Vultr Cloud Compute, Managed PostgreSQL, Object Storage, a GPU worker running Qwen and Blender, and a bridge that talks to the headless game server. Auth0 handles login, the DeepSpace SDK runs the companion app, and the gatorcamp.us domain ties it together.
AI tools: Claude Code with multi-agent workflows (builders, photo-fidelity reviewers, adversarial technical reviewers), Qwen for character specs, and Gemini for the NPCs. ## Sponsor Track Details

Best Entertainment & Creative Technology Hack
GatorCampus 64 turns the University of Florida campus into a playable co-op world. Friends can explore familiar places at Mario’s pace, take on campus missions together, and play original activities like Gator Chomp Chorus and the Lake Alice regatta.

Best Use of DeepSpace
DeepSpace powers our Field Board and its leaderboard data. The app uses DeepSpace authentication and RecordRoom data with permissions and reactive queries. The game server sends signed, verified run results to the board. Judges can explore it at gatorcamp.us (https://gatorcamp.us).

Best Domain Name from GoDaddy Registry
Our project is at gatorcamp.us (https://gatorcamp.us), a .us domain operated by GoDaddy Registry. We registered it through Porkbun, so we’ll confirm with the organizers that it meets this track’s eligibility requirements.

Best Use of Gemini API
Albert and Alberta, the in-game mascots, answer players’ questions. For known game questions, they use our game guide; for open-ended questions, they use Gemini to respond in character. Players can ask for help or chat without leaving the game.

Best Use of Vultr
Vultr hosts the live game server and API that power the site’s character-building service. When a player submits photos through gatorcamp.us (https://gatorcamp.us), the job is queued in Vultr Managed PostgreSQL. A Vultr Cloud GPU runs our Qwen vision model to turn the photos into a character specification, then runs Blender to build and export the playable model. The worker validates the model and generates a preview; the resulting assets are stored in Vultr Object Storage and deployed to the hosted game server. This connects Vultr’s compute, GPU, database, and storage to a complete flow from photo upload to a playable character.

Best Use of Auth0
Gator Pass uses Auth0 to link a player’s website account to their in-game identity. Players type /login in the game, scan a QR code or enter a device code on their phone, and approve the connection. Once linked, their custom character can be selected in-game.

Challenges we ran into

Level limits: coopdx caps a mod at 35 MB and a level at about 650 m across, so the campus had to be split into stages with careful polygon budgets.
Doors Mario couldn’t walk through: coopdx pushes Mario off walls differently from the original game, which our tests modeled, so about 80 doorways were impassable in the real game. We rebuilt our test model from the game binary.
Things showing through walls: outdoor materials were switching off the depth buffer, so characters showed through trees and walls.
New characters need a restart: the game only compiles models when the mod loads, so adding a character means restarting the server. We batch those restarts.
Testing without seeing the game: our AI agents can’t watch the screen, so validators and simulations stood in for play-testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Photo to playable character in minutes, live on a server anyone can join.
Logging in from inside an N64 game with a QR code.
Interiors scored 8–9/10 for photo accuracy by independent reviewers.
The real Reitz Union, inside and out.

What we learned

Faithful scale and small details (curbs, bollards, the BLUE/ORANGE wall letters) are what make a place recognizable.
Offline tests catch a lot, but the real engine always has one more rule.
Multi-agent AI works best with clear contracts, regression checks and human play-testing.