Fourteen senior DigiPen students formed an epic team this year called The Bakery to craft a creative and exciting virtual reality game for the HTC Vive called Night of the Living Bread: Dough Rising. The students developed the game for their year-long game project.
Dough Rising is a follow-up to the student game Night of the Living Bread, which was made by two of the team members when they were in high school taking the DigiPen Pre-College Program. While both games share the same basic premise — one that pits players against a horde of zombified gingerbread men — they differ dramatically in execution. Whereas the original Night of the Living Bread was a top-down action game with bright, cartoonish graphics, Dough Rising is a 3D game played in virtual reality that borrows elements from recent team-based shooters like Left 4 Dead.
One important game element that survived the transition from the 2D original to the VR successor is clear: the puns. Each Night of the Living Bread game includes an array of bakery-themed wordplay — from the enemies players face to the items players use in pursuit of confectionery justice.
“We knew for a fact that was one of the main things we loved about the game was how punny it was,” says gameplay engineer Chris Hendricks, now a Class of 2017 graduate from the BS in Computer Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation program. “One of the first documents we made as a team was a spreadsheet that was just a giant list of puns.” Examples include the magical “crescaber” weapon (a saber made of crescents), outrageous monsters like the “Fondoom” (an animated chocolate fountain), and action movie–inspired one-liners such as “The end is rye.”
To learn more about Night of the Living Bread: Dough Rising and to see gameplay footage of this entertaining VR romp, watch our video interview with three students from The Bakery, below. If you have an HTC Vive and want to play Dough Rising, make sure to check it out in the DigiPen Showcase.
Thanks to all the student team members on The Bakery for sharing their stories.
- Dakota Galayde, Producer and UI/UX Designer
- Mark Quinn, Game Director and Level Designer
- Marcus Doiron, Art Producer and Technical Artist
- Evan Alderete, Sound Designer and Composer
- Nathan Negreiro, Technical Director and Gameplay Programmer
- Nadine Young, Art Director and Animator
- Scott Smith, Gameplay Programmer
- Chris Hendricks, Gameplay Programmer
- Max Greene, Environment Artist
- Khan Sweetman, AI Developer
- Daya Singh, Gameplay and Audio Engineer
- Sarah Martino, Environment Artist
- Ben Adman, Logo Artist
- Geoff Kaiser, 3D Artist