We took the theme sideways and went with deep undercover! You play as Deaper, with assistance from Dieper outside in the van. Infiltrating your old workplace to delete your browser histories, you maybe find more than you bargained for... (disclaimer: bargain not yet in game :wink: )!
Head here to find our first release
Any and all feedback is very welcome!
During brainstorm we had quite a large amount of possible game ideas, but when we stumbled upon a "Unstable" game to be fixed by the players, three of our team members realized they had tried to do that concept at a previous jam. They had to give up on it then, but we were all enamored by the concept, and decided to do it for this jam. There are (or will be) various bugs in the game that the player will need to figure out and report for fixing. The idea is to create a puzzle type game where perception is rewarded. Here is the progress for day 1 (including beautiful programmer art and models):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx98VgNWs
I do hope we haven't been too ambitious, but when has that ever stopped anyone :wink:
Oh, I'm sure you'll want to try this masterpiece for yourself! Be warned, the video shows literally everything :joy: https://github.com/HDJKleissen/LD49_JAM/releases/tag/v0.2
I always try to use a gamejam to learn something new about making games. The last two jams I did, I learnt more about 2D, animations, a little bit of AI and doing isometric in Unity. This jam however, our usual artist could not make it and after looking around two of Pats friends were up to do art for our Jam game. Thing is though, they are both 3D artists! So for me it was a perfect opportunity to actually start and finish a 3D game in Unity.
We started Saturday 9am by bringing together all the ideas we had thought of in a mind map (of sorts, it really only goes one level deep). Then we worked each idea out a little bit. This is the result:
When we got past the "Glitch" idea, we realized the other ideas were losing their glimmer, and making an unstable game be the game seemed like a lot of fun. So we went to work.
The artists designed the area, and created a mood board/color palette. They then went to work creating a list of items that would be available in the game, while I went to start implementing the various bugs we wanted to have in our game.
Eventually we started to merge stuff together, and while there were a few problems with importing the models properly (scaling would be off, or the model wouldn't be at 0,0,0 of the object) we finally got everything looking at least proportional! This meant I could get to work designing the interior of the level, and adding the various bugs that the player would have to find.
This entire time it felt like we had time to spare; the main mechanics were done Saturday night, the art assets were in on Sunday (the artists had to work on Monday unfortunately). But of course it wouldn't be a Jam if time didn't get away from us. In the end there are one or two unintended bugs in the game, the most obvious being the NPCs staying highlighted if you fixed them and certain objects not getting highlighted at all. But all in all the mechanics of the game still work, which means that the biggest bugs in the game are cosmetic. Not bad at all for a gamejam.
In summary: I decided to learn more about 3D work in Unity this jam, and learned the following:
It was late night on Saturday, and coding was beginning to get error-prone. I laid down the keyboard and picked up the camera, and holy crap Cinemachine is so incredibly easy to use (bar a small keyframe mistake that I didn't get time to fix). The intro menu was made with it :)
Originally I edited the color of the material in order to show a highlighted object, but this proved... less than visible on some of the objects. I realized that emission would be a much better way to show what you were selecting!.. But then I realized that anything that emitted light would already have an emission map (damn you artists and your diligence in details!), leading to me writing a way hotswap the original map back and forth (which works a treat!).
It was the first time I've done it, and it is so much easier than 2D. I can't pinpoint why, but man.
The character controller component does a lot well, but I did run into a couple of frustrations along the way. Luckily I wasn't the only one, and the internet was there to help!
The very first time I used particles was this weekend, and even though it took me a little bit (and I'm still not quite satisfied with the result), I am happy that I at least got myself started with Unity's particle system. Looking at the huge list of possible components I'm sure there is a lot still to learn though.
With all that said I am looking forward to playing and rating everyone's games, and I hope you play ours as well. Until Jam 50!