PIVOT

Pivot is a coop game where 2 to 4 players move a magical couch through a haunted house by moving an actual couch in the real world.

This game was created by C15 students from Utah Games MEAE of the University of Utah.

GDC ALT-CONTROL CONTEST

Team:
Game Designer:Owen Templeton
Programming Engineer: Divith Nagaraj Reddy, Adhithya Narayanan, Ben Johnson

Technical Artists: Peng He, Liyu Sun, Jiaqi Han, Jialu Wang
Game Artist: Yiling King, Ye Tang, Fangyuan Ye

Audio Engineer: Nishant Verma
Game Producer:Mingyang Cai
Jan-April 2025
Genre: Simulation
Link: https://maiyake.itch.io/pivot

BACK TO ALL GAMES

Play as Movers:

Players play as a group of movers who’ve just taken an order to move a couch into the innermost room of a very old house. Little do they know, however, their customer this time is an exorcist, and the couch has magical charms on it that can cast out the ghosts when placed at the right spot. The ghosts, obviously, aren’t going to like that, so they will chase down the movers once they enter the house. The movers’ only hope then is to move the couch to the location and hope that the charm works. The control of Pivot is very straightforward. The in-game couch moves along a pre-determined path, and all three axes of rotation, plus height movement of the real-world couch, will be reflected exactly to the in-game couch. Therefore, by rotating, raising, and lowering the real-world couch, the players can control the in-game couch to avoid obstacles and advance in the map.

Alternative Control:

Unlike traditional games, GDC's alt-control showcase requires participating teams to design and develop custom controllers based on their gameplay concepts.
The controller for Pivot is a 1:1 real-world sofa equipped with sensors that track its rotation and position. These inputs are used to provide real-time feedback in the game, allowing the in-game sofa to respond accurately to the player's physical movements and orientation.

Design Pillars:

Humourous
Players cannot become truly stressed from the interaction or gameplay.
Must be entertaining and humorous within the time frame of 5 to 10 minutes.

GDC Goal - [Spectacle/Attractive]
Must be attractive from the outside
Must have a unique quality to it
Must make players excited enough to line up to play
Goal of 5 minutes

Equal Co-operation
Multiple players must be involved.
Must require both players at all times.
Should not become leader-follower
Given a convention space must be easy for strangers to work together

Game Development Documentary

Amercian Cartoon Art Style

As a technical artist, I developed American cartoon effect shader, tested the cartoon style procedural material, and put forward ideas for interactive items in the scene.

My first thought was a post-processing solution to outline the objects in the scene. The effect I referred to was from 'Borderlands.' As a technical artist, I started by searching for some tutorials online and discovered that NPR has many solutions: material ball solution, texture solution, and post-processing solution. For the material ball solution, each model would need three layers of materials, and without modifying the rendering pipeline, one material would be used for outlining, one for providing PBR colors, and one for binary lighting, which is very inconvenient. The texture solution requires much more artistic work, and procedural textures can handle large building surface materials, while using regular PBR models to render. After watching some tutorials, I found that using Curvature+Levels to process the edges of the textures and adding defined edges could achieve a cartoon-like effect. The post-processing can target all objects in the scene. After watching more tutorials, I chose to offset the scene depth map by one pixel in each direction and create the outer outline. I also extracted structural edges by offsetting the world normals to create inner outlines.

Post-Process Cartoon Effect Test 01

Post-Process Cartoon Effect Test 02

The final result is very similar to the 'Borderlands' effect, so our team chose this solution. Later, I also added a more cartoon-ish approach by clamping the lighting for post-processing materials to create color blocks.