The company I'm working at is 100% remote, and I'm thus organizing a virtual Christmas party for us. This year we are trying out an online chat tool named Gather. It allows you to walk around as a little avatar and talk to people more naturally than you would over e.g. Google meet, Zoom or Teams. In a traditional video call, you can't really naturally interact with people once you become more than 5 people - you end up with two people talking and the rest just listening. The neat thing with Gather (and similar tools, there are a lot of them) is as you move away from another person, the lower the volume, so it helps to build these sub-groups of conversations that you get naturally if you were to meet physically.

Gather has a retro-type of pixellated style, like an old school top-down RPG. It's fine, but maybe a little ... impersonal out of the box IMO:


So I sat down and made it more personal The Gather engine works in three layers. At the bottom is the background (floor, mats, the bottom of walls), above that is all sprites (avatars, tables etc added in the Gather map maker), and on top is a "foreground" image layer (the top of walls, hanging christmas decorations and so on). Importantly, the foreground is a transparent PNG, which means you can use it to introduce fake light sources, shadows and darker areas that actually affect the sprites "below" them! Here's my outcome (done in Krita and Gather's map editor):



It has a bunch of little extras, such as the ability to open gifts and get messages, race go-carts around the icy lake and play board games. Hope it will be a fun Christmas party!
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Griatch

Neat.... really good for introverts I think.

If you got volunteered for this duty, Griatch, then heart's out to you. lol

Looks nice.

Not really, the introverts won't show up for this in a 100% remote company, there is no real other option, bar getting everyone together for a physical meeting (which is not something we do all that often).


Glad you think so. I do think stuff like this (virtual spatial meetings) will be needed more and more for businesses without physical offices.


Thanks! It's less me getting volunteered and more me taking it on. I've been advocating for doing something like this over having a huge zoom call ... and in a group of engineers, like who's going to do the custom artwork if I don't?
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Griatch