Thinc Ahead 3D

The brief

Ellen gave me three ingredients. One: every desk at Thinc Ahead has a Nerf gun... and they get used! Two: Esther, the co-owner, is on leave, so the team had a life-size cardboard Esther made. She turns up where you least expect her! Three: the building itself, a brick building in downtown Eindhoven with four floors, a spiral staircase and a mysterious red vault door in the basement.

The idea wrote itself. Niels and I are about the same age, we both lived through the days of Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. So: a first person shooter in their own office, with foam darts, for up to twelve players. With bots, so the office is never empty. With cardboard Esther popping up around the corner. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Thinc Ahead 3D.

What Ellen collected

Ellen walked through the building with her phone. She came back with 65 photos, named per room, the four floor plans with dimensions in millimetres, photos of the Nerf blasters on the wooden floor, and the print file of the cardboard Esther. The portraits of the team and the logo came from their own websites.

The front door at number 128: Ellen's photo on the left, the game on the right. Work in progress, like every screenshot here

From millimetres to a map

With a bit of experience in retro games, I quickly had the source material converted into 3D artwork as if it is 1996. A low internal resolution that is scaled up with hard pixels, textures of 64 by 64, no lights, no shadows. That style is also the plan for speed: I wanted everyone to be able to play, from an older smartphone to the powerful office Macs.

The floor plans became a map in real metres, scaled up about one and a half times, because 450 square metres is tight for twelve people running at Doom speed. With AI agents I tested the gameplay automatically, with tests that check that every spot in the building can be reached. From the basement to the roof, including the hiding places in the toilets and the garage.

The back of the building: the chimney, the fire escape and the extension. In the game the ladder became a staircase, so everybody can use it

Ellen reviews the office

I showed Ellen a screen recording. Her answer was one sentence: on the first floor the red wall and the wall with the rugby players belong on the opposite side. She was right, and not only there. (She is always right, by the way... but that is another story.) With a few iterations the graphics became better and more accurate. What is left of the camera, what is right of it, what is behind it? Since then a room gets its orientation from at least two photos before anything goes on a wall. The murals themselves are Ellen's photos: straightened, scaled down to pixels and hung where they belong.

IT STARTS HERE, the red wall in the boardroom. The wall in the game is Ellen's own photo, straightened and scaled down to pixels

CREATE A LEGACY on the first floor, after Ellen pointed out it belonged on the opposite wall

The people

Twelve colleagues, twelve seats. Their portraits became faces of 48 pixels in 24 colours, like the face in the status bar of Doom. Yours looks around, gets startled and looks worse as your energy drops. The bodies are blocks in the colours people wear in their portrait, and everybody got their own head: a bald crown with a grey ring, a cap, curls, a ponytail, a beard.

Esther cannot be picked. She is the cardboard. Her standee is cut from the actual print file, flat as a board, with a fold-out foot, and she pops up just around the corner from where you are. Hitting her is worth three points, the golden one ten. On the box cover she stands next to Niels as a co-star: as herself, in cardboard.

The team: their portraits above, the same twelve in the game below, with the two office cats and cardboard Esther on her fold-out foot

There is an announcer, like in Unreal Tournament, but it is an office. Five in a row is PROMOTIE! Ten is MEDEWERKER VAN DE MAAND! Whoever ends your streak gets ONTSLAGEN! And if you hit the office cat: NIET VOOR DE POES! The cat is fine, it is foam. The voice was generated once and ships with the game as small audio files.

The office has a narrowcasting screen, a showpiece of the birthday boy himself. Ellen sent a screenshot of it. Every screen in the game now shows the live ranking in that same layout, including the real upcoming birthdays! In game narrowcasting! We are going full circle, people!

Left a part of the real Kantoor Live screen in the hall, right the screen in the game: same layout, but it shows who is in the lead

The cars outside are the cars of the team, by model and colour. And yes, there is an ultra massive, over the top foam cannon with six barrels, and when you aim it at a parked car for too long, the car catches fire! The announcer has a line for that too: DAT WORDT FIETSEN!!!

The car park: the team's own cars, number plates blurred, and the same row in the game, by model and colour

DAT WORDT FIETSEN! The foam cannon, a car that has just gone up, and the wreck on its way down

Keysies and Touchies

With a first person shooter, how it feels is very important. The controls, the speed, the aiming. Super important to get right, because if it plays badly the fun is gone in no time. That takes a lot of iterations. At first the bots were too good and I could not hit them. Now a bot goes down after a single hit from a human, while a bot needs five hits to take a human out. That way we keep at least a little of the feeling of being the boss over AI and bots! Players with a keyboard and a conventional mouse have a different interaction model than the people with a touchscreen. I played both ways extensively, which led to several simplifications and speed-ups. When you start the game you get a short instruction on which keys or parts of the touchscreen do what.

MEDEWERKER VAN DE MAAND! Ten in a row, in pixel letters with confetti

On a phone: the first six seconds show where your thumbs go. No buttons, the right thumb aims, shoots and keeps firing

Live

The game is playable by now, live on its own address: thincahead-3d.dsd164.com, through the same cloud stack as Protect Your Eggs: a small server in my homelab, behind the cloud. It runs in the browser on a laptop, a tablet or a phone. Pick your favourite colleague and press play!

The attic with the ping-pong table. Hit the dartboard up here and an English darts caller shouts one hundred and eighty

Conclusion

What a time to be alive. A cross platform 3D multiplayer first person shooter is now a present you can get for your birthday, custom made from a real office with real colleagues! Insane! Not so long ago you would have needed a budget of millions for this. And although that budget of millions is still welcome (ha!), the cost of this kind of technology is clearly coming down. I do think the human attention to detail remains necessary: it makes the difference between a fun gimmick and something truly cool.