This week in Games, Gender and Culture, we spent the week focusing on our individual projects. This week I got familiar with the app called Tabletop Simulator on Steam. Eli, my partner for the project, and I  spent a few hours in Virtual Reality planning out our game in the Sandbox Simulator for Table Top games. When we first began, things were a little hard to understand, but after some work we figured out how to import our own games and create a game within a game. The idea of working in Virtual Reality has tantalized me for a long time and I have been dying to try and do something collaboratively in Virtual Reality. When I picked up the game, the first thing I did was play chess with someone else, just to get a feel for the controls. It was impressive. Within the game there are many preset boards which you can use to create your own game, and this can be done both on desktop and in VR. The first thing Eli and I discussed about our project was the way that we would present our game board, which we hoped to make multi-layered, and we had difficulty figuring this out in VR. In the coming weeks we hope to import our own game board model into the game with photoshop, and continue trying to work out how this game will look. 

But for now I will discuss my immersive experience. There were a variety of games to play in Tabletop Simulators, from Dungeons and Dragons to Chutes and Ladders, and when I went into the list of servers I also noticed that creating your own game was not uncommon amongst the community. Most people seemed to have private servers in which they would make games for the vast majority of people to play and try out, making this game a very portable asset for game design in the future, maybe if only for table top games and less for digitally intensive games.

According to Steam, there is a massive assortment of players who are creating content for Tabletop Simulator, which makes having assets easier to manage. This not only helps us keep track of our things better, but also makes the mess to deal with after playing the game much easier to handle. Last year in Game Design Eli and I worked on a project with many different assets that had many different categories, which made keeping everything in the right spot difficult to do, but in Tabletop Simulator this entire problem is solved with a 3D cut and paste mechanism that makes keeping the game organized a breeze.

This program ended up being one of the biggest blessings for me and Eli during this quarantine, as much of the back end of our logistics about the game were complete, but we had no place to collaborate and create. Having the time to figure this out helped us land on Tabletop Simulator to write our program in. I’m glad that we were able to find it because it will make it easier to do our project.