Congratulations to the Wootopia Studio Team from the UC Santa Cruz Serious Games Class of 2021. Wootopia won a Merit Award in the Tencent Youth Game Designer Challenge of 2021 for their innovative game and 2021 Capstone Project, Wood Joints Cafe. This title, based on a traditional Chinese puzzle game, helps players build spatial relations abilities by choosing and rotating pieces to build virtual furniture.
Wootopia Design Team:
Yulin Cai – Creative Director | Design Integration Director
Mengran (Luke) Jiang – Producer
Haotian Lu – Technical Director | Technical Artist
Jason Tsai – Technical Director
Yi Zhao – Art Director | 3D Artist
Holly Cheng – 2D Artist | UX/UI Director
Wootopia Research Team:
Wenbo Xie
Yulin Cai
We had the privilege to speak with Yulin Cai about Wood Joints Cafe to learn more about the games past, present, and future, as well as the Tencent Award.
How did the idea for Wood Joints Cafe come about? What was the inspiration?
The original idea was inspired by a traditional Chinese puzzle game, called Burr Puzzle. A Burr Puzzle is an interlocking puzzle consisting of notched sticks, combined to make a three-dimensional, and often symmetrical, object. I first heard of Burr Puzzles in one of my classes during my undergraduate years as an architecture student. I thought it was cool, but hadn’t had a change to dig deeper.
I joined Professor Edward Melcer’s ALT Game Lab during my second quarter as a Serious Games student at UC Santa Cruz, working on a potential Serious Games side projects. Before one of our weekly meetings, an idea flashed into my mind. What if I can teach kids about Architecture in a simple but entertaining way. Naturally, Burr Puzzles came to mind since it’s the kind of tool that motivated players to learn and naturally improve their spatial ability. This matches perfectly with the ultimate goal of Serious Games.
Burr Puzzle
I did a quick sketch and presented my idea in the meeting with Prof. Eddie. He liked the idea and asked some probing questions to help me think deeper about implementation. After that meeting, I continued researching Burr Puzzles and brainstorming ways to morph it into an educational game. Assembling furniture seemed natural to me because in China, Burr Puzzles are widely used in furniture. Also, I was playing Assemble with Care at the time, and it felt so satisfying when I repaired things in each level with the accompanying beautiful story.
I first proposed a storyline about a young lady who just moved into a new city. She needed to assemble furniture for her new home, similar to IKEA furniture. Her father, who is a carpenter, sent her his hand-made furniture. After thinking of the potential furniture pieces needed for a home, I felt it might not be diverse enough for a puzzle game. My past work experience as a Barista saved me. I changed the setting to a young lady who needs to assemble furniture for her new coffee shop, which will require different kinds of tables, chairs, pastry shelves, etc. Her father, who is an eloquent carpenter, sends the handmade furniture to support her. I designed a mailbox at first in a 3D modeling tool and shared it with Eddie (Melcer). I didn’t have enough programming experience and therefore couldn’t present the assembling logic. However, the idea stuck. I reached out to two of my classmates, Vernon Lu and Ryan Tung, who have experience in 3D game design, and asked them to evaluate if my idea was doable and if they were willing to team up with me for this side of the project. But then the pandemic struck. The project was suspended for a while. I didn’t have time to revisit it until the end of the third quarter in MJ’s (Professor Michael John) studio class. We were asked to design a game without being given any constraints or themes. I thought it might be a good chance to team up with an engineer to make this idea happen. Jason Tsai was a great candidate. We called this project WJ Demo.
How hard was it to work on this title as a team during the pandemic?
The WJ Demo was developed remotely. We started the project at the very beginning of the pandemic. We all stayed in our apartments and used Slack and Zoom to discuss ideas. Our biggest difficulty for developing a 3D puzzle game was that oral communication in many cases can’t express ideas clearly, especially when I was the only person who understood the logic of Burr Puzzles, but didn’t know how to code very well. I gave Jason a real Burr Puzzle tool and sent YouTube assembling videos to him to help communicate. Jason is an awesome developer who keeps himself motivated to learn. Through Zoom meetings and live coding sessions, we finally created the demo. It served as a great foundation for the Wood Joint Cafe game, which was built over the next few quarters.
I used this demo to pitch my Capstone Project and was lucky to be selected as one of the the greenlighted Serious Games projects. Vernon Lu and Luke Jiang joined the team as the Technical Director and Producer. We’re the initial three teammates to work on this project. We also had Jason and Ryan join us as part-time engineers, and Yi Zhao joined as the part-time 3D artist.
One benefit of working remotely was that we could more easily recruit teammates from outside of the class. I saw an awesome 2D design that Holly Cheng created for one of UCSC Games undergraduate projects through Twitter. I asked Luke if we could reach out to her to see if she wanted to join our team as a 2D Artist. Luke, and ultimately Holly, said yes. We also recruited Audio Director Tiantian Wang in China, who has excellent game audio design experience. Thus, we were able to do build a unique, collaborative team during the pandemic.
A big thanks is owed to Luke, who brought the team together and managed the time and tasks clearly to every team member. We were kept on the track even though we couldn’t meet with each other in person. The Dev Team was hard working and talented, and they figured out great ways to solve technical difficulties one by one. The Art Team was creative and came up with appealing art and music, which made the game feel just right. Our mentors, MJ, Elin Carstendottir, Eddie, and Magy Seif El-Nasr, were supportive and gave valuable feedback, help, and support during this hard time. My undergraduate professor, Yahlai Zhang, served as our Subject Matter Expert, which made the game more professional in terms of spatial reasoning education.
Did your team continue to work on this after graduation? If so, the entire team? Or just parts?
After graduation, some teammates were in the job hunting process, and others were already at work. However, most of them were motivated to polish this game for competitions. We used the weekends for our meetings, and everyone worked on their parts in their own free time to make this happen.
How did your team decide to enter the Tencent contest? What was the submission process?
Tencent Youth Game Designer Challenge provides a platform for university students to showcase their game design talents. Hosted by Tencent Institute of Games, this competition seeks to discover the best game designers, game developers, and creative game works in universities all over the world. Our producer, Luke, has was already familiar with the Tencent Institute of Games, which hosts the contest. During the school year, we came up with the plan to participate in the contest after graduation. It was a logical decision since Tencent is famous for promoting Serious Games, and the judges are all professional designers in the game industry. This seemed like a really great use of our time and talents, and so we entered.
The submission process was not very hard. We signed up and submitted the Testflight link for Apple users and .apk file for Android users. We also had to submit a cover image, a trailer/gameplay video, and a PowerPoint deck. It took a few months for judges to review all of the submissions. When we passed the first round, they assigned two mentors to give us feedback and guide us how to further polish the game. As time passed, for better or for worse, we became gainfully employed, and thus couldn’t make all of the accommodations we wanted to further polish the title. However, what we pulled together was good enough, and the Tencent staff informed us that we won the Merit Award. It was truly an incredible experience.
Now that Wood Joints Cafe has received this fantastic recognition, does the team plan on continuing with the title?
We’re always motivated to make this game better. However, we realize the limitations we are facing, and we are also interested in continuing to craft our skills at work. Most of our teammates are employed at games companies and we’re waiting for the right time to team up again to continue development.
Is Wood Joints Cafe still available for download?
It’s available both in the Apple All Store and Google Play: