The jam submission (and fixes)

The idea

This was quite a fun jam. Sadly, I hadn’t much time this weekend. I’ve spend the friday and saturday mainly on the road and outdoors, so I only could come out with some thoughts. I liked the seaside topic but I thought the fighting and fishing components don’t felt right for me this time, so I decided to go with something else: a chilled day on the beach on which you’d collect some shells. Also the concepts of the waves really fit to the logic of one-hit.

The implementation

I used Unity as a game engine, did some graphical “work” with photoshop and made some music with a Korg Volca FM. The soundeffects were from freesound.org and the two characters are made with kenney’s character generator - so all in all the setup was pretty basic and quite fast. I used a small default template I created a while ago for 2D games withe the universal render pipeline. This helped me a lot since I had a menu, scene transitions and an AudioManager right from the start (also the webgl template was integrated in that one, but that’s basically everything the template could do).

The technical part and the pitfalls

Basically, I decided to go with the easiest option: add a rigidbody, some colliders and some triggers to the game objects. I worked with some simple tags for the different elemnts. I had a working prototype with some boxes pretty fast (around an hour and a half). The movement animation of the waves was done via code and spawning coroutines, also the generation of the shells and crabs. The core is pretty generic and it would be easy to add new shell types, waves, birds and crabs to the game, but I didn’t had any time to do this within the time availble to me while the jam was running. I also completely forgot how animations and animation controller worked - so I had to get back to Brackeys for this topic.

After the prototype was working, I started to create some dummy graphics (I wanted to create the actual graphics but it looked really silly), so I decided to focus on the time and not the quality. After everthing was in place, I tweaked the core mechanic until it was a bit more fun to play (timing and generation wise) and focussed on some basic sound effects as well as the main theme.

As usual I also found some bugs in the original submission and cleaned up some stuff afterwards. Right now everything should be working.

The second graphics iteration

I then replaced the used placeholder graphics step by step. I’m really not an artist, so it took me quite a while to produce something that wasn’t hurting the eyes: the beach, the wave, the shells and the birds. I was quite happy with the outcome and added some simple post-processing effects to make it a bit more vibey.

More ideas

Since the time was really short on this sunday afternoon, I had some nice ideas for future development, which were sadly out of scope for this jam:

• Add multiple wave-types
• Add more shells and shell-types (maybe some gain more points but move from the time to time)
• Add some more details on the beach
• Increase the difficulty while playing (right now everything is quite linear