Ol-Factory was a game I helped make in one of my elective classes during my graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University. I was a part of a team of four that did not really have specific roles, but my contribution involved programming and design tasks. In its current state, Ol-Factory first introduces the player to the ten different types of smells and then tasks the player with creating specific scents, based off of a description, by combining two of the basic smells through intuition and a bit of trial and error. Get enough of them correct and the player will have passed their technical interview and get hired, effectively winning the game. I specifically programmed the smell combination button console system and the structure of the technical interview part of the game.
This project started from the notion of what visualizing smells would look like. The particle systems associated with each of the ten smell types remained the same, outside of some refinement, since the beginning, but originally the game allowed the player to combine smells at their leisure to see what would result. It was more of a toy or experience than a game, but halfway through development it was suggested to flip the script and turn it into a guessing game. We went through a handful of iterations, making many user interface and experience improvements each time, and got to the current version of the game which can be downloaded and played here: https://eangrady.itch.io/ol-factory