Game Jam - Oakland MADE Jam
A game jam for Oakland MADE Jam, lasting 12 hours on site.
With team of three, I programmed all parts of the game.
The other two: an artist and music composer
As an East Bay Area resident, I joined a game jam in Oakland that was on site, giving me a chance to make a 12 hour game with a small team. The theme was "rig", and we went with a "rigged game", meaning one level that feels fiendishly hard, but beatable. We agreed to make a simple platformer game based on the internet meme "cat mario" based on the 12 hour time limit. The game turned out to be a good learning experience with on site collaboration and team decision making.
Making a game jam game in 12 hours on site means making decisions based on my programming experience. I went with a 2D platformer since it was the quickest to make a game. Easily went with Unity since it is my primary game engine.
At the beginning, I quickly found a basic platformer controls scripts online to save time and use as starting foundation for player controls. I then tweaked the controls to allow for jumping when the player holds the button and stops going up when letting go. With that basic controls implemented, the only other fundamental aspect was the collisions. The player has a Rigidbody2D with dynamic collision, while the blocks were kinematic.
After player controls, next was collisions for the brick platforms (brown), the lava blocks (red), and the exit goal (green). I used the triggers for the lava blocks and the exit goals since they were simple and quick to implement. For the exit goal, the message would pop up with a message that the player won the level. For the lava blocks, the doggie is supposed to "die" with a death count increasing by one and then respawn at the beginning. To give a twist with the rigged platformer game, I added in a boolean for objects to disappear, and it is its own separate component, meaning I can make some trap platforms along with hazard platforms that disappear if the doggie hits them. The disappearing platforms would make the game harder while the disappearing hazard laltforms would make each run slightly easier.
Finally, I wanted platforms to move, and I felt lucky to quickly implement the waypoint system since I previously used that from my Fintail Gladiator as its own independent component that can use any game object. I applied the waypoint system to the various platforms and hazards to give mostly tense timing to jump.
With such limited time, I knew it was not possible to have the most polished platforming game, and I somewhat decided to leave some of the primitive collision of player pausing in midair when pressing against a solid, allowing for some fluid wall hugging as a "feature". Feels better making only one level for a rigged game than having multiple dodgy levels.