How to Make a Gorilla Tag Fan Game

/ Tutorial, Unity, VR / By

Gorilla Tag has become one of those games that has forever made a mark on the VR gaming world. Whether you enjoy Gorilla Tag and want to make a fan game or you’re a VR dev looking to understand it’s unique move mechanic, I think there is a ton you can learn through replicating the magic of Gorilla Tag.

In order to get your game working, you’re going to need two things. A game engine and a way to replicate the movement of Gorilla Tag in that game engine.

Luckily for you, we’ll be using Unity and amazing free code on Github to get all this going in no time.

If you’re new, I’m Fist Fist Full of Shrimp. I make shrimple Unity and VR tutorials. I also just love talking about game development!

Unity Setup

To set up our project, we’ll be using the Unity game engine. If you don’t have the game engine installed and don’t know how to do it, make sure to check out my original tutorial and VR setup here!

The other thing we’ll be using, is my free Unity VR Template, which can be found here. 

Once you’ve downloaded the project, we’ll just need to add it to Unity Hub. We can do so by selecting Add project from disk, and locating the downloaded template project file.

Open up the project (which can take a minute) and let’s see what we’re working with!

Importing The Gorilla Tag Movement

With our project setup, we now need to import the Gorilla Tag Movement scripts necessary to replicate the same type of movement used in the game. Luckily for us, Another Axiom has provided some amazing code that gives us exactly what we need.

To download, follow the link here. 

After downloading it, locate where the file is downloaded and do the following.
  • Extract (unzip) the file.
  • Open up the unzipped file and locate the “GorillaLocomotion” Unity Package File
  • Import the files into the VR Template Project (You may see some warnings here, but you can disregard them)
Once imported, we can navigate to the sample scene provided by the newly imported assets.
 
Assets -> Scenes -> Gorilla -> Gorilla Locomotion
 
Once we’ve opened up the scene, we’ll be greeted with this!

Fixing Up Our Scene

This scene need a bit of a face lift. Luckily, we can do that with a few quick material swaps.

  • Go to the Materials Folder
  • Duplicate any Material and call it “M_Green”
    • Change the Base Map Color to Green
  • Drag the M_Green Material onto the floor in the Scene

Feel free to continue to do this for other objects in the Scene. 

We also need to fix our Rig. Since we’re using a more up to date version of the XR Interaction Toolkit, we’ll need to fix our Gorilla Rig.

  • Create an empty object called “Gorilla Rig”
    • Add Component -> XR Origin
  • Expand the original Gorilla Rig and select the two Spheres and Gorilla Player. Copy and paste these and make them children of the new Gorilla Rig.

 

  • Select The New Gorilla Rig
    •  XR Origin
      • Origin Base Object = Gorilla Rig
      • Camera Floor Offset GameObject = GorillaPlayer
      • Camera = Main Camera
      • Camera Y Offset = 2.5
  • Make this a prefab by dragging it into our Assets -> Prefab folder

We now have a fixed up rig and a more colorful scene.

Testing

When recreating a game, it’s important to experiment and see what new things you can add to the existing title. A few settings you can change can be found on the Gorilla Rig that can add new flavor to the movement mechanics.

  • Expand the Gorilla Rig GameObject
    • Select GorillaPlayer

Here you’ll find all the settings that you might want to adjust to your movement to add new twists to your game.

If you’re using a Quest 2 or 3, make sure to use the Oculus Link with a device that is set to Developer mode. Once you’re connected, you simply hit the play button and can test out your scene!

 

Conclusion

This was just a quick and easy tutorial to get Gorilla Tag like movement into your game! There is still a ton to learn and improve on in this prototype so make sure to check out the basics of Material and Lighting to add more flavor to whatever you’re creating.