Our little game dev collective decided to do a game jam last month. We participated in the XPlace Summer Game Jam which was a great exercise in scoping a project into something that could actually be finished! We’ve been working on other projects together, but without strict deadlines it was easy to let scope creep. After a week, we had created a physics based horde-survivor, with objective focused gameplay mixed in, which you can check out on itch.io.
Even though we constantly tried to trim scope, we were working all the way down to the wire, fixing bugs with less than an hour left until submission time. We built a ton of gameplay systems and ended up tuning the game in about 4 hours on the day of submission. We wish we had more time to really nail the gameplay beats but we are excited to have a solid foundation of systems to build on top of.
Some Unity concepts we needed were new to us, which meant we had a lot to learn in a short time frame including:
- Additive Multi-scene management for load screens, and connecting the main game to the escape sequence
- Managing cameras in conjunction with multi-scene management.
- Using Addressables for our game data objects
- Custom Inspectors for quick in-game testing of event driven systems
- Modifyable Contacts to enable smoothly transitioning NavMeshAgent controlled kinematic rigid bodies to ragdoll
- Pooling SFX and VFX in a central manager to avoid overwhelming the player
Along we way we also built some gameplay systems that were new to us, like:
- A kinematic vehicle controller based on Ackermann Steering Geometry
- A stats and upgrade system inspired by a tutorial and Unreal’s “possesion” concept in its gameplay framework
- Projectiles that arc towards a predicted target location
We’ve got a ton of stuff to talk about here, but they’ll each get more in-depth blog posts. We’re planning to continue iterating on our gameplay and get a demo up on Steam to gauge interest in the coming weeks!