You’re the keeper of a space-lighthouse, tasked with protecting the travel safety of nearby spacecraft in nebulous areas around a small world!

Play the game in-browser on Itch

Features in this release:

• Random distress call events appear
• Multiple types of event
• Scaling difficulty
• Player score

Features we didn't have time to implement:

• Sound design
• Networked social aspect (scoreboard)
• Ship scanning
• Variations in scan time
• The usual polish

Technologies Used:

• Unity C#
• Blender
• Adobe Photoshop CS6

Categories

I haven't the foggiest how this works. I suppose we don't want to be judged on sound since there isn't any!

What we've learned:

Boy, this was fun! I've always wanted to make a space-themed game. We learned how to mix 2D and 3D for the first time, using different z-indexes to layer views. We played around with scriptable objects to tailor events to the user, and attempted to get the UI as text-free as possible to convey things easier and more intuitively. As we ran out of time at the end, I resorted to throwing in a few text boxes with instructions, but I'm confident that if I were to work on this again in the future I could make some fancy animated prefabs with some slick new icons to improve the way you interact with the hazards and ships.

The thing that took the most time was the panning of space when you're looking through your telescope. Finding the edge of the sprite, and clamping the camera to those bounds was a bit of a blocker, until I realised I had to funnel my values through three different spatial systems - local, to world, to camera view points! D'oh! At the very least, smooth interpolation of the movement there helped create a space-atmosphere.

The main thing we drew from this jam was architecture-related. We kept the organisation of our controllers unified and consistent, using privacy more efficiently and creating utility classes to help switch between views like a state machine. I would love to delve further into Unity components that help simplify these operations, as I've seen people at my company sitting with screens full of arrows and boxes before - there must be a reason!

I also learned how to build for web, and how to deploy the game to an online service. This was easy-peasy, and I can't be more impressed with Itch's service.

Please let me know what you think! If anyone would like to take a peek at the source code let me know.