Sweet Dreams, Roguelike Jam 3 / Alchemical Dreams, PB & Jam 2022
This was a project that was developed in Unity for two game jams concurrently, one 48 hours and one two weeks, both starting at the same time. We decided to make a game that would fundamentally work for both jams, so we made an alchemy dungeon crawler for PB & Jam (the theme this year was ‘alchemy’), and rework and expand for Roguelike Jam 3 (theme was ‘flavorful’). The final project was a procedural dungeon crawler with turn based combat encounters with a particular focus on exploration.
The team consisted of two programmers, me and Sky Gamby-Haycock, art was done by Lord Dredlam, and music was by KawzS.
I was in charge of implementing the procedural dungeon generation (environment building, placing of items, placing of enemy encounters) and player movement, and both Sky and I worked on the minimap system and UI. This was my first time implementing a procedural dungeon generator and I’m pretty proud of the result, the final system was tuned to make maze-like dungeons with lots of dead ends and false paths. The fun of exploring these dungeons led me to implement the minimap as a collectable that you wouldn’t find until later in the game and adding a candy wrapper trail left behind the player character to act as a breadcrumb system before finding the map. I also created collectables that would unlock the boss location and ability locations on the map as well as creating way-point markers that pointed to those locations when the player hadn’t unlocked the map (clamping the markers to the screen wasn’t good enough feedback in the maze, so I implemented a custom system where the position of the arrow on screen would be the screen edge intercept between the centre of the current room and the centre of the target room, this was the player could infer direction far more accurately). The candy wrapper trail required a highly optimised system where each wrapper would be added as a quad to a mesh object contained in each room (with a max wrapper count of 15,000 per room). This meant that only the wrappers in the current room had to be rendered and also meant all the wrappers for that room could be rendered in a single draw call (each different wrapper sprite was added to a texture atlas at runtime); it would take roughly an hour and a half of walking around for the player to run out of wrappers for a given room (so very unlikely to happen in actual gameplay) and performance wouldn’t be affected at all (even on mobile devices).
Shadow World, Kiwijam 2022
Shadow World was a game made in 48 hours using Unity for Kiwijam 2022. The theme of the jam was ‘together’ which we expressed through a two character puzzle platformer. The game-play is focused on a series of machines with the ability to split you and other objects into a light and shadow part that each occupy different planes of reality. You solve puzzles by interacting with these two worlds.
The team consisted of two programmers, me and Sky Gamby-Haycock, and art by Morgan.
I was responsible for programming interactive physics elements, things like buttons, levers, doors, and moving lights. And both Sky and I worked on the split screen dark world effect and mechanics. I also built the level that ended up in the submitted game, added the basic UI, and composed the music.
Kaitiaki Harvest, Regenerate Game Jam Matariki 2022
Kaitiki Harvest was a game made in 48 hours using Unity for Regenerate Game Jam Matariki 2022. The game is based around the idea of regenerative Maori foraging practices which was expressed through top down exploration and basic plant harvesting mechanics. The game came in 3rd place for Best use of theme, and 3rd place for Most likely to make an impact.
The team consisted of two programmers, me and Riley, art was done by Tina, and music/sound design was done by Finn Mitchell-Anyon.
I was responsible for programming the heads up display and text user interface, as well as the goal system and game states. I implemented a dynamic and expandable system for managing the player inventory and the requirements for each gathering goal (which used a season system indicated by nine the stars of Matariki). The final system ended up looking pretty unpolished due to time constraints (48 hour jam), but the underlying system was robust and allowed for expansion if time hadn’t been so tight.
Water Creature Land Creature, Game Jam Aotearoa 2022
Water Creature Land Creature was a game made in 48 hours using Unity for the Game Jam Aotearoa 2022 following the theme of ‘Transition’. The game was a platformer where you play as a creature in a constant state of evolution between being adapted for land or adapted for water. The goal of the game is to reach the end of the level without becoming stuck in either state (water or land); getting though the level requires use of the player character’s differing movement and abilities that change depending on where they are between the two states.
The team consisted of me on programming and general Unity usage, art by Anne, sound design by Amit Barde, and music by James Cullen.
I was responsible for all the Unity work including coding and asset management, as most of the team weren’t familiar with the software or Git. The unique piece of work I did for the project was the creature's handling and abilities, which would change depending on where in between the two states it is (shown by the bar in the top right corner). This was achieved by defining the stats (jump power, land speed, swim speed, etc) for those two states and writing an algorithm that interpolates between them based on what point along the evolution bar the player currently is. Other than that, the rest of the project was fairly typical for a 2d platformer. Other notable work I did was making a custom buoyancy system that felt fun when splashing around as the water creature, and implementing a custom user friendly mixer system so that the sound designer could tweak all the levels to his liking.
