Heya, Long time no see!
It’s been a while hasn’t it? But it’s been a busy while.
Over the last few months I have been busy at university developing a few game projects within groups and it has been quite the journey. I have made around three games at the moment, with the forth and most ambitious one starting next term. Out of all of the projects I have made so far, I believe that the first one is the hidden little gem out of the three, especially considering how many constraints that was on this particular project compared to the others.
The Jam
If not everybody knows, a game jam is a event where us developers need to create a game from scratch in a limited amount of time and following a certain topic or prompt, for example a prompt may be “The Environment Changes You”, or, “Progress Will Make You Weaker”. Our prompt was “One Button, Hyper-casual”. What this meant was that the games that we developed within our duo groups (each team consisted of two people), had to abide by the limit of a single button to control the game, as well as being “hyper-casual”.
The Plan
Luckily, our lecturers allowed us to choose who we teamed up with, therefore I teamed up with someone who was in an old group of mine (I was essentially exiled from this group as a result of my exile from another group (was not fun times)) his name was Will and he is the gods (or.. Allah’s) greatest gift to mankind.
Mine and Will’s initial idea was a bit… haram, but I soon came up with the idea of using Morse Code as the primary game mechanic. Morse Code of course, being able to be represented by a button press, or a button held down. Will, then immediately came up with the further idea of navigating the player around a maze whilst attempting to dodge enemies.
I do not remember who came up with the Mouse theme (I believe it was me, but I am unsure of it) and the idea of the game was conceived. You would control a Mouse who was a secret agent around a series of mazes with increasing difficulty and the eventual additions of enemies.
Development
The development of the game was actually not that difficult, Will swiftly had most of the art done fairly simple and while the code was a bit stubborn at times it was still doable in the two-week development period that we were assigned.
The hardest parts of the project to develop was most likely the player’s collision. Because we were handling with the collisions between planes we had to create a unique way of handling the collisions between the player, the walls, and the enemies.
The enemies were quite easy to develop, we just made them move in a random direction each time the player moved, thus giving the game a sort of pseudo-turn-based style of game play.
At the end of the development period the game looked and worked perfectly! And then we compiled the game and the collision… did not work. Now I will have to state that this was most likely Unity being Unity since the collision worked in engine, but not in a compiled build.
Fin.
So yeah that was a short recap of one of first games I have contributed to that I am actually proud of! If you want to play the game you can find it [here] (if you wish to play the game you must open it in Unity or else the collision doesn’t work. ) (https://upsilondiesbackwardss.itch.io/mouse-code), alternatively you can find the source code of it on my github.
The next game jam we shall be doing will be an interesting experience. It is quite ambitious and will be challenging, but I am fully confident in my producing skills and my six other team members (including Will :o)
Alright i needa crap now.
bye.