Flotsamfluke is a multiplayer cultural project. It was developed for the Cinekid festival. The Cinekid Festival is the largest international film, television and new media festival for children aged 4 to 14 in Amsterdam. The game was about 3 kids playing with giant mickey mouse hands with objects which kept falling from the sky. Punching, grabbing and throwing things in an unique world.

Abrupt start
I got called a couple weeks before the deadline by the main developer and got asked if I had time to help out. I set up a meeting with the project manager and designer.

Initial meeting
While waiting I read a bit about the project and started to experiment with multiplayer. My first time. I managed to get something basic going on. Then the meeting started and slowly throughout the meeting I realized that they actually didn’t have a lot. What I have developed waiting for them is what the main developer had accomplished in months. After explaining this to the project manager, of course they were not really happy and fired the previous developer.

Situation
I only had a couple weeks. It had to be a multiplayer VR game and they didn’t have any hardware. No computers which the build had to be published on. No VR headsets. All I had was a macbook which couldn’t run the SDKs required.

The grind
I decided to come up with a plan. Do anything I can and try to find some headsets which I could use. Contact many people and even my old university. Just to test out something. I managed to lend an old desktop. Develop on the desktop and prepare for the couple hours I could test things out at different locations I tried to organize. Try to be as efficient with time as possible and many late hours.

The hand in
The festival didn’t have any internet and in order to get a build there, it had to be via an USB stick. But as you may know, often you still need to do some tweaks. Due to the nature of the festival we learned about the reset features a bit late. The festival was around 10km from my house. Things kept going wrong and in order to develop. Every time I had to tweak something, it was biking back for 10km and biking to the festival for 10km. I think I biked over 100km that day.

The festival
The project was also in competition with other projects created for the festival. Thousands of children came to the festival and played the game. They all could vote which game they liked the best and they decided Flotsamfluke. We ended up winning the public price and the price money with it.

We were really overjoyed to see it being so well received, through all the chaos. Seeing everyone having fun with it.