The way of the Banana

The way of the Banana

Hi, Marco here from the Banana for Scale Team, to tell you our story: In 2016, while I was giving a talk about Blender at the University of Salerno, I came up with the "banana game" as an example in which you have to measure objects with bananas. The idea came from the "banana for scale" meme on 9gag, a social network full of strange people and memes.

Having the Vive as a starting point, my idea was to transform the two controllers into a banana and a marker respectively. It was a Multiplayer only Game. The VR player should have guessed the height of the objects that the player sent to the PC via a 3D model gallery.

With the sharpie you had to write the size of the object in bananas on a virtual sheet placed behind the player

As much as a demo of this kind could really be developed in a few days, two unknown factors remained:

How the VR user would communicate the size of the object in banana terms; How to prevent the PC user from cheating by simply saying “it’s not true”, since real time handwriting recognition is not an easy thing to develop.

The game allows you to change the height of the in-game objects either through direct player input or randomly, so as not to have the same objects. This led to the creation of a standard banana size and a system that enlarges and shrinks meshes based on a containment system.

As soon as we received the Valve Index controllers - Knuckles controllers at the time - I realized that the handle of the controllers is frighteningly similar to a banana. But how to solve the game design problems of the original idea?

I do not remember exactly how the idea came but "the tube to throw bananas into" completely changed our perspective: a giant tube with 2 side buttons to be pressed with the palm of the hand.

the old CRT screen on it is absolutely random, we needed a place to insert an UI that looked consistent (and I love old CRT screens)

The Dispenser is part of the simplification process: initially there was a banana tree with a bunch of bananas and a pile of bananas where players could pick up a single banana. After developing the scene, we realized that the bunch of bananas was too high and the pile of bananas was too low

So we created the Dispenser, with the same buttons as the tube, for continuity of interaction.

The marker, as in the original idea, has remained: now the user can write on every surface, mark the height in bananas or simply scribble around!

One of the problems of virtual reality is the variable height of the users. Job Simulator used changing the world scale to help less tall users, our game world has very precise measurements based on an algorithm.

So we took inspiration from the VR demo of Star Wars Robot Repair where the workbench can be raised and lowered as desired, applying it to both the tube and the distributor.

And for larger and taller objects we made at least 20 different tests before arriving at RadioBanana which allows the player to lower and raise the object at will. Here you can see some of the various iterations

We redesigned the bananas a few times before we came up with a shape that we liked and that was quite "Bananish"

Another of the key points of the demo that we were going to create: we wanted it to be usable on all devices.

The development of the graphic part had already begun when Facebook released the Oculus Quest specifications, so we had to change direction. So we took a path that is called, in the case of Unity, Lightweight Render Pipeline (now Universal Render Pipeline) and Shader Graph. So we made a lot of custom Shaders in the game.

The Desktop version features VS mode which allows the viewer to rival the player in VR. We included this game mode because we realized several things:- People in groups always go to VR arcades - If you play at home it is usually to show VR to someone else, and stay there doing nothing - It's hard for anyone in a house to have two VR headsets to play with a friend!

So “the tube” allowed us to connect the two game environments, all the bananas that the VR player throws into the tube end up in the gaming environment of the PC player. The PC player therefore has the objective of choosing the objects to be measured, changing their height and collecting bananas and using banana juice to create maluses that prevent the VR player from continuing to measure, allowing time to run out.

The Special Bananas were decided on social media: I asked my friends to suggest some ideas and, from the list of absurd things they came up with, we pulled out a series of special bananas to be included in the game! We are currently implementing 4 of them, but we will later update the game to include others as well.

Even the objects to be measured were decided on Social Media, our fans made a list of things and I chose the 100 fastest things for me to model. We are keeping the others for the additional upcoming update packs!

This was the trailer of the Alpha version of the Game, from last summer.

So, thank you for your time and we hope You enjoy Banana for Scale!

F.A.Q.

Can bananas be tossed?

Yes. And you can toss the bananas everywhere. So go find the hidden Achievements!

Can I peel bananas?

Currently, no. Maybe in the future

Can I insert the head into the tube?

Yes. There was actually an easter egg, but we have to think about it.

Can I write on all objects with a marker?

Every Object for the Scale, the Dispenser, the Tube and the floor.

Who is the Voice actor of Joe the Banana?

Christopher Sacchi, a very nice Indie Game Developer. Check out his work on Twitter https://twitter.com/losttraindude

Will it be released on PSVR?

We don’t think so

Will it be released on Oculus Quest?

Game is already made with the Oculus Quest in mind (and a VS option) but we don’t have the hardware yet.

Steam workshop enabled?

Not Yet

Do you like bananas?

A lot

Do you like bananas *winking*?

Hey! *Blushing*