Time to get back into writing blog posts!
A little late, but this one is going to be about the game my team created this Global Game Jam on January 25. The team consisted of 2 musicians (Natalie Gall and Alvin Lee), 1 3D Artist(Jordan Bolton), 2 3D Artist/Programmers (Myself and Matthew Bingham) and 2 programmers (Louis Deane and Alex Lovett). We used Unity as our game engine, as it is flexible, powerful and easy to use, and most of us having semi-professional to professional experience with it.
The theme this year was “What home means to you”, and we spent a good amount of time brainstorming ideas and concepts. In the end we had the game idea narrowed down to:
- A side-scroll adventure, with the protagonist trying to get home, an aesthetic full of nostalgia and longing for a place to belong.
- An “Overcooked” style multiplayer game, helping around the house with all of the chaos and homeliness of a family Christmas gathering.
- A survival game in which you restore your broken home, surrounded by danger and cold which contrasts and helps augment the warm and secure feeling when in the home area.
Whilst considering this, we also realised something crucial: Home spelled backwards is emoh. So we pretty much had to do choose the dark indie survival game. Once we decided the theme, we then had to come up with interesting mechanics, and features that would form the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the game.
The two most interesting ideas were multiplayer co-operation, and the great idea that you would be unable to see the enemies, and could only see their shadows, cast by the light you shine. Using this as our basis, we envisaged many different ways to get players to engage in teamwork, for example, having different character roles, one who could interact with the world, but has no light, and one which can shine the light to let people find the shadows, but nothing else. We also had many thoughts on “end-goals”, such as rebuilding the house, collecting fragments of a family photograph, etc.
With such a large team, the division of tasks was relatively easy:
- Jordan focusing on the character asset and animations
- Alvin on the SFX
- Natalie on the soundtrack
- Myself on the Environment assets
- Alex on the multiplayer and gameplay logic
- Louis and Matt on the Mutiplayer and Gameplay logic as well as Level Design.
Below are the environment assets that I created, and a final visual of the game. In the end we managed to get a lot of functionality in, and the multiplayer system worked extremely well. The multiplayer logic did take a long time though, and we didn’t end up achieving everything that we wanted, or manage to get our own player model with its animation in time. We are looking to polish it a bit more in the coming weeks, and create a nice video or make it playable online. will post a new blog post when we have done!
Adam Tunnicliffe 