 You want now with no further delay. I'd like to introduce you Tom I've never been introduced by a poo story before so that's kind of cool. Hi. I'm Tom And I spent the last year building a spaceship in a caravan With a couple of other people as well, and this is a sort of horrific harrowing story of how we did it So who are we there's Charles who's just gone running off to the van You'll see him in a second. He's responsible the electronics and the video system that I'll talk about a booking system There's me wrote pretty much all the software in it Tim there who sits in the corner and complains That's how I do it and Chris who's not here What I'm like, I can't edit it. I'm using IE There's Claire who's our trusty driver and bookings assistant and boss Chris who I don't think is here. He did a bunch of the prop work for us was a bunch of other people and so Russ Teff John T basically anyone at the London Hackspace on a Tuesday night becomes our test players and We abuse them and Teff is an honorary captain as well He's a lot nicer to people than we are when we play it So what it is? It's a three-player story inside Caravan spaceship and the crew's taken on a small training mission after have been given a bit of training and they fly and They usually explode What it actually is is a caravan full of our dream those laptops and several kilometers of orange wire that isn't labeled There's a if anyone hasn't played it yet, there will be spoilers in this We'll be playing it later on all of an ounce of how we're gonna sort that out in a minute So this kind of happened because we were bought the is anyone heard of Artemis? Yeah, excellent. We were playing that and thought it does need more explosions and actual props and things Stuff falling off the ceiling of smoke machines. So I started ripping apart the network protocol The developer wasn't particularly helpful with this. So obviously just fire out wire shark And it turns out he was just throwing structs into network packets. It was really really simple to pull apart So I wrote a proxy which takes game events and throws them out over open sound control So we can trigger smoke machines and other displays and all kinds of fun things That's on my github site if anyone does want to build have a go at building a spaceship Wouldn't There's a few problems in that Artemis is kind of hard to play in about 15 minutes So if we're gonna take this whole thing to other places to play we can't train someone to play that because it's basically a sim So we jokingly thought why don't we write our own simulator? How hard can that be? And then we thought well, that's cool. We've got that done So where can we install all of this? We can't put it in a room anywhere because I was got a spare room that we can permanently assign to this We haven't got a garage the Hackspace probably wouldn't let us do it because the room needs to be used for other stuff So we jokingly said hey, why don't we use a caravan and then Charles bought a caravan? And it turned up and that was it. It was about 200 quid and it was How the body shell was held on with ratchet straps because it was a complete state We bought it from the same people that Brainiac get theirs from so they'll give you a clue of what it was like so a bit about the design process which is basically Wouldn't it be cool if? Which usually happened on IRC on the toilet wondering back from a pub somewhere or while hitting the crap out the inside of the van with hammers And that led on to oh my god. Yes Very rarely did we say that's a bad idea, which is pretty stupid We wrote basically I sit and write some code for this I usually on my lunch break at work or in the evenings or on the train or anywhere where I had 15 minutes and somewhere to put a laptop And then we'd all sit around just laughing hysterically at the idea and then it would go back and we'd add more And eventually we got a plan which was the players would be introduced to the ship They would launch prepare for hyperspace jump slingshot around Mars fly through a training area and then return home and dock with a rotating station What actually happens during the mission? This is a bit of a giveaway the slingshot maneuver goes totally wrong the ship breaks You have to repair it the training area is actually a war zone with live targets And the station is rotating and there's no docking computer. That's not true There is one now, but we don't tell anyone unless they're being particularly bad We decided we'd need a kind of a pilot tactical officer and an engineer That was the basic idea we had when we started doing this The other thing is I can't write anything with AI in it at all I've never bothered to learn anything or sit and figure it out So let's decide we decided to have a games master sat in the back of the van Running everything instead as you turned out to be really fun because if we're doing an eight hour day with this It's kind of nice to have one person outside training the next crew one flying the current crew and one person in The back killing them because the one in the back is actually somewhere. It's really nice to sit and have a drink You can toy with people as well. It's really fun So as a bonus to that the GM room is actually labeled transporter room and is functioning So the idea is that okay. This is a massive giveaway No one knows that we're in the back room and the transporter works halfway through the flight and Yeah, someone jumps out and kills you Yeah, also we have a video system on board as well. So the original plan was to have The crew would be flying and would be instructed over a video call how to fly the ship basically your mission controller It turns out for various reasons that wasn't ever going to work Which I'll get to in a minute and so once we we kind of designed it We decided to set up out doing the actual hard work Which was that was the state of the caravan when we got it. It was full of crap It was rotting the shell was falling off. There's a lot of rotten spas holding the walls up We're not holding the walls up We smashed all of those out swept out the inside started painting the outside to waterproof it because it wasn't it still isn't waterproof Actually, there's a leak above one of the seats There's anyone that played it last night. We'll find out So, yeah, we sat there painting it black Then we decided we actually had to build the thing inside We found Chris and I found a huge chunk of MDF behind our flat and no one was guarding So we took that and people were quite happily saying oh, you're the guys building the spaceship Do you want bits like yeah give us switches and buttons and things so in the top left-hand picture there The right-hand console has got a keyboard which was from a police radio control unit Phil had a whole load of those and he just kept saying do you want them like yeah give me they're really cool the joystick that was actually a Force feedback Microsoft force feedback stick It died And they're really hard to get working with modern software because they're this one was actually a game port So we had to hack and adapt it together and that didn't last There's a lot of bodging in this so we eventually painted everything. There's a Chris on the left on the right-hand side assembling the the engineer console That was buttons junk the keyboard in the middle is actually from a cash register. It's now a USB keyboard Which is quite fun. I mean it's still the transporter room door Finally got a dashboard in place and at this point we realize actually I'm gonna have to sit and write this Because we built bits of it, you know, this is the first ever version of it Which I think the screenshot file was created in November a year ago about that That's the first time I ever got unity to actually talk to an Arduino That was horrible We go there's the keyboard there So we started we started building all the systems that the ship's gonna use and it's really cool writing this because you realize You're writing a spaceship Not like a game. You're actually kind of putting physical things in and then you look at it and go And get all excited I do anyway, but you know I had a spaceship So we started building the reactor control panel, which is a bunch of switches and light sense and really disgustingly bad soldering down there Please don't look at that and this is the first time the game ever ran in one with all the machines They're all the the clients connected That was on my desk at work during my lunch break and my co-workers wondering what the hell I was doing I'm writing a spaceship go away It basically it basically worked at that point So we kind of decided we needed a deadline as you do and we thought Well, no make a fair is coming up the one in Newcastle So let's apply for that which we did and they said yeah, cool We panicked a bit because we basically hadn't got any of it working And the night before make a fair we were sat in the car park basically building pretty much all of it So we got the dashboard installed the engineer console Just about fit we had to slice a whole load off the top to get it in because the measurements were wrong We've attached the door and sort of the hardware We did actually totally forget to plate the network cables with us So a six hour drive to Newcastle with a rotting caravan behind us We weren't sure if it was going to be safe or not. We got there and we've got no network cabling We had no seat for anyone to sit on So we kind of yeah, it went a bit wrong that we spent most of Saturday morning shouting at each other trying to get it working and we had to send out Like Johnty and Russ ran out to get his network cables from Maplin at quite a big expense We've only got it all in and and it sort of worked That's it working. That's the first ever time it ran in the caravan with all the all the hardware in place Well, that's probably not the first one actually because there's no one swearing and pulling their hair out there We had a great testing the make a fair was the test for this We kept getting crews in so the first crew that came in it was like a family like two kids and some parents And they said can we have a go and we're like, okay We've got a sit level with you here. You are literally the first people ever to actually play this in here So things are gonna go wrong and they were yeah, it doesn't matter. You know, it's it's home built. That's fair enough So we'd start the game up Something would either non catastrophically or catastrophically go wrong And we'd have to spend 15 minutes with me repairing it or someone fixing it And then we go outside and say who wants to have another go and it was a really weird testing thing He's not like throwing software in front of someone and saying, you know, does it work? There was three people sat there going like This is a spaceship, but like yeah, yeah, but you know, what didn't work. What did you think was what do you think was really difficult? What did you think was bad? I don't care. It was a spaceship like Thanks for your enthusiasm, but Can we get some more feedback on that, please and as a kind of a safety thing we Decided to have a captain captain sat in the cabin With the players so that when things did go wrong You could dive over the dashboard and pull a cable out or plug a cable in or kind of gloss over it with storyline And that ended up working so well. We've kept doing it We brought it back from make a fair This is the point where we decided to add more things and tidy up what we had and start trawling this out to other places This is the phase we call where did all that time go because it kind of as ages ago So we had a huge list of problems from make a fair When we finally got useful things out of people things like the engineer wasn't actually fun at that point The keys were too small to read. You couldn't actually tap them It was kind of a grid of very tiny writing and it was really difficult to read them in the light So we end up buying some USB lights that didn't really work either. So we thought let's screw that. Let's scrap it Let's do something else the targeting system was and continues to be very difficult to use I'm working on trying to make that not rubbish at the moment a pilot radar is confusing But the problem is that I know how to read the radar because I wrote it And also anyone that's played elite is generally okay with it because it's been an entire ripoff of the elite radar system And a lot of this is ripped off from everything that I like about space games so that's cool the captain bit in the cabin works really well not just for glossing over problems but also for kind of Immersing people in the story a little bit more and people start to build up their own little stories around the game Around the common theme of it's your first day flying this have fun We've had George is here No, we keep stealing his line about people having their first This is their first flight after five years of flight school and everyone just looks up like five years of flight school We're at the car park with a folder does that count? One of the puzzles is based on USB cables being connected in a hurry Let that one sink in That went that broke There was a massive panic by the guy trying to connect everything. He broke one of the USB connectors, but it was hilarious because they died So apart from the actual problem list we have we've got a big trello board full of things There's a section marks. You know what would be cool, right? So the windscreen should crack. How about we get a success screen there More switches more buttons. What if things fall off the walls? Can we get a self-destruct for really bad players so we can get them out and get the next crew in can we get a chase cam? Can we record players with cameras? Can we have a button that you should never push? I'm like, yeah, of course we can so we got a chase cam and the projector that works quite nicely Actually, and it's really fun people outside because they can watch their friends fail So the top right there we added more switches to the engineer console because if you're running a nuclear reactor You should sit in front of it and go Be really scared because it's a nuclear reactor and obviously we added a button that you should never ever push On people do it's lovely. It's self-destruct. We added for fun. That was quite nice We decided to add Christmas tree lights because all spaceships have Christmas tree lights They don't know their Christmas tree lights, but and for a laugh We we tend to run games on Tuesday nights in the hack space where You have a timer running on the dashboard and it's a scripted totally scripted thing There's no one in the back trying to kill you and basically how quickly can you get to the end of the game and four minutes? 26 is the current record if two people want to Know 426 this is the most this is the only documented one Anyway, it doesn't matter. I was flying so We'll try and be that later we get some beers first if anyone wants to try beating the record two people is a good team One of you is bouncing around the cabin doing two jobs and the other ones like intensely flying, but it's really fun Well, yeah, we decided to add more physical puzzles because people really enjoy People really enjoy getting up and doing things. I don't think they get confused. I'll talk about that in a little bit So we added a James manual which teff sat and corrects as a hell of a lot for me in one Saturday morning We have emergency repair kit, which is actually and these these cables here need to be reconnected in a certain order for the Ship to continue working and if you unplug them, it stops the ship working, which is really funny And this is all kind of related to the same thing. So there's a manual which tells you to use the repair kit to use the To plug things in in certain places So we started off quite basically with this. It was quite a simple game to start with And then it's evolved. So this is basically what it used to look like Switch connecting a bunch of machines couple of screens smoke machine a couple of puzzles around the cabin projector And then we're like, yeah, this is what it looks like now So a comms machine has a long webcam long USB connection to the back room So people keep saying how are you streaming videos so quickly over this network? And we're like we're not it's just a very long USB cable on a camera. We've added wireless to the caravan That's actually really useful. We've got a couple of a couple of tablets Android tablets which now control the entire game. They're quite nice because you can bring them into the cabin with you and start Playing with only one person in the ship We have some fans that now turn on and off depending on how much power is internal systems Exploding flap that always makes me chuckle That's a that's a flap on the wall that pops open and drops things on you got strobe light which is now broken Seatbelt signs cabin cabin lighting. We just went a bit crazy inside adding all kinds of stuff On the bottom right. You actually see a thing that says video server With five cameras attached. So hang on one second I Charge you there Can you turn the cameras on? Yeah, good to go So it's on Yeah, yeah, we got that Yes The camera systems that we have Well, I'm currently in geosyncras all bit above you and yeah, let's see where should we start up so We we've got a lovely grant from Floss UK who provided us with a Set of five seven twenty three cameras that are hidden around the ship So we've got One's hidden so you can see the main view screen the captain which is normally standing here Directing everybody and telling them to get out of the way and actually press the buttons that the screens are telling them to Pilot position hiding down here The tactical officer over here as well and The hardest job of them all you're gonna play tonight is out over here engineering And yes, it's all running off of the lovely software written by Copenhagen sub-orbitals Called slow mix if you want to use it It's really handy stuff It lets you do any kind of video editing You can switch between Cameras to overlays like you should have on the screen at the moment Hello, you still there Cool, so yeah, and that's all running off of a Dell server Which we traded for a box of cupcakes as much of this spaceship Happens to be like that And that's all controlled by Don't know if you can see that One of our many tablets that hides in the back And then we can change which camera you're viewing And what's going on in the ship it makes us extra evil because when we can see your reactions And we know that throwing a missile at you is going to make you panic We can switch to the right screen and get your reaction on camera I Will I'll leave you and get back to the asteroid so that we can do some training tonight Good luck. Bye And the really fun part with that is it streams to you stream as well And it's currently streaming to the TV in the bar so later on You can you can come have a go and Watch everyone fail. There's no sound in the bar at the moment though because we've lost a cable But so we had a bunch of really weird interesting fun things we've noticed while doing this the biggest killer of equipment is enthusiasm We've killed three joysticks one of them was a force feet a sidewinder force feedback stick Which they're not mechanically they're not meant for people to kind of whack around everywhere Two other basic choices have died as well We just buy multiples of them because you can't really robustify them or anything. I made that word up That's good, isn't it? Two Arduino's have died because we got a bunch of relay balls that keep killing things a floppy disk drive Which was for a part of a puzzle. We never got really got round finishing an industrial machine e-stop switch Which that shouldn't really break If that had been a drill and not the airlock dump system that would have been really bad They've had a dead laptop smoke machines died and a couple of strobe lights about one of the strobe lights died on the way here But that's what you get with five quid strobe lights People tend not to win their panicking they don't read messages in front of them They just flare their arms around and shout and go and hit the keyboard and that's usually breaks things So we have these prompts that pop up on the screen and then they now beep as well But people still don't tend to read them if they're panicking and people die So we kind of figure you know if people are really struggling to play this then they're not the ones that fault It's us trying to throw too much of them at once. So it's like simplifying things quite a bit the docking computer before Used to be a joystick thing basically telling you how to twist the joystick and rotate it. That's gone We now do that by actually handling the play of a joystick and say move the stick around. This is what the ship does That works a bit better. It's now the docking computer has been replaced with a very very simplified thing Which is basically a line this cross with this cross and you will land safely It really simplifies the game and while they're doing that they don't actually seem to realize they're moving the entire ship to fit In the bay So it's kind of we this is a kind of route I want to I want to play with a bit more actually that really abstract the game out into small sub games like this That are controlling the main game Yes players don't read text. We're trying to balance the the the kind of oh my god. It's complicated It's a spaceship against this is actually playable I don't design games. I maintain exchange servers for a living. So I have no imagination So basically if I I'm doing a lot of things wrong with game design I know but I'm solely learning so that's good the engineers a good example of complicated So on the left there's the old one where the very simple screen your balancing power your tapping keys So we got rid of that because that's actually more difficult to play on the right We now have a an entire bunch of switches which are now replicated on the screen in front of you Roughly laid out the same. So it's a little bit more intuitive like if something starts blinking You can tell roughly where it's going to be on the keyboard on the switches We've always discovered the modular hardware is a good thing We should have discovered this the easy way by actually reading stuff about this rather than just Throwing money and things at it The Arduino is we're now building these kind of their boards with screw terminals down the side If the Arduino dies you rip it off and put them back on again simple strip boarding is evil get rid of it I'm gonna do some proper circuit boards at some point. We need to keep spares of absolutely everything Players really really really like Physical stuff they think they're gonna play a computer game when you yell at them stand up and take that panel off the Wall there's a confused look of excitement and what on their face and they get up and do it The smoke machine is really nice because it kind of acts as a as a damage indicator You don't have to read the damage display to see how knack of the ship is you just take a breath And that's usually enough The James manual is going down really well, especially when people get it's a firefly joke the only firefly joke in the van It's dead get over it Slip that one in We got a couple of kind of launch procedure checklists and things that the tactical player has to tick and do They don't go down quite well as well because you've got a pen there You can kind of tick them off and beepy buttons. Everyone loves beepy buttons. You just tap things and they beep They don't matter if they do anything. They just like beeping. It's brilliant So if anyone wants to come and fly we're here for the weekend up by the bar We're based also based at the London Hackspace We tend to run the game on Tuesday nights Time depends on whether the pubs open or not and they're doing burgers Also keep an eye on the Twitter account for this evening because we're gonna announce when we actually open to start playing We're trying not to run it all weekend because it's something I do actually want to see things But also we're streaming games on the you stream channel and in the bar as well That's it. That's that's that. Oh, that's a really dark screenshot of someone flying out of the bay at the old bay Actually, that's been changed. Yes I Don't got any questions about it. Oh, there's loads of people. You're done the front you go first Did you have any issues with intellectual property or anything like that to actually get this game off the ground or Well, I hope not No, all the sounds sound effects are usually they're all recorded or Nick Nick's Taken they're all creative common stuff from free sound The textures are all pretty much all my own work A lot of them are just photos of things that I've mucked around with the models are all mine as well That's why they're so awful. Oh No, if you want to the the all the code models this entire thing is on my github account You download it and build your own spaceship if you want If you've had you want to contribute to it as well, that'd be really great because there's a lot of tidying up I can't be bothered with Well, if you want to do any model work, that'd be really nice because I hate blender. Oh, hello Yeah, we usually say what was the age limit we say 14. Yeah Yeah, you're right It depends on which one of the jobs you're gonna be doing kids kids flying as pilot everyone wants to be a pilot But no one wants to learn how to do it You pay a lead. Oh, yeah, you're in straight away. You're the next pilot Oh, they were they were brilliant, weren't they? Yeah Where can I run to next I'm gonna make way back this way Where'd you see the game going in the future? You're gonna keep it as a very scripted game or no at the moment I'm trying to write a new version of it, which is it's more of a toy box for us So there'll be it's kind of FT. I would like there's a bunch of sectors in space You can jump between but at each sector is a kind of there's the only thing prescript is the environment at each sector So there'll be a nebula or a star something like that And that'll let you spawn certain things to screw around with the players again We want someone in the back room doing that because it's really fun for us to toy with people But eventually we'll get there. It's taking a long time because oh You've bit the back could you just shout Just shout Not not yet ask him. Oh, yeah, so he was asking if we record the camera footage So people can come pick it up later on At the moment the server can just about handle five 720p streams It's hitting right at the CPU level so much so that I have to start them at five second intervals Because if all the keyframes hit it once it falls over and dies So it doesn't have enough to actually save yet But yeah, we're hoping we currently stream to you stream But I'm gonna try and get it to stream to YouTube so it does the automatic saving and stuff Yeah Thank you, everyone