Block 'Em Sock 'Em Beat Battle
In our school we have something called "Design Week", and in the Game Design program this manifests as a one-week team game jam. The teams are made up of six people each and have a mix of years one through three. (Usually evenly.) This year's theme was "Alt control". Basically, we needed to make a game that used interesting / unorthodox controllers rather than standards like keyboard and mouse and gamepads.
Design week starts with two full days of not actually working on a game. Rather, we have to iterate through many ideas both individually, within our groups, and within the room. Our group came up with several good ideas, but a running theme with many if not all of them is this: scope. This one-week game jam was more like two and a quarter day of actual game development. Couple that with being students and not industry veterans, and the result is a very tight turnaround time for whatever idea we decide to go with.
One of the original ideas, proposed by one of my teammates, was to make some kind of mecha game, controlled by a "DDR" style foot pad on the floor. There would also be hand control. Ideas for this game included PvP fighting, two people controlling the same robot, destroying a city environment, and so on.
At first, we decided that this idea was too complex and so we started to look at one of our alternate ideas: an "Inside Out" inspired game where you have to control emotions, or possibly facial expression... needless to say we also had trouble with this idea. We ended up going around in circles and came back to the mecha concept.
It needed to be scaled down, however. Make it a fighting game where people fight with just the legs? We are getting somewhere but there is an issue. We have to actually make the foot pad (Using an already existing DDR pad would feel like cheating.) and doing that quickly with cardboard, tinfoil, and wire would not be easy. The controller would have to hold up to abuse as well.
I proposed we keep the same concept, but switch to fingers mimicking what the feet would have done, and have a small "foot pad" for the fingers. (Keeping the leg-only theming.) That was it, that is how we will scale down the idea to being something we can accomplish in such a short time.
My main contribution to the development of the game was the UI. Even though this is my first week of using the Unity engine, I jumped in and tried by hardest. At first I tried the "UI Builder" tool within Unity. Very quickly I found this to be a hard tool to use and pivoted to the legacy "uGUI" system that involves adding components to a canvas.
All in all I ended up creating four separate UI's. Three are entire scenes and the fourth is the UI that is overlayed on the main game play scene. That is the one I started with:
There is a health bar for each player, as well as a "beat bar". Players can only perform actions on the beat, and this flashing bar helps with this timing.
The game needed a title screen too, so this is what I cooked up:
How about an end game screen? I also cooked up one of those:
And finally, a tutorial screen! This one shows an explainer video cooked up by another team member:
There is a bar at the bottom that shows how long the video is!
My first design week went well, I think. I will have five more over the course of my game design program. Going into the program my number one concern was my ability to work with other people, and this design week has put those concerns to rest.
At some point I plan on making a separate "portfolio" section on this website, and I will better document this game when I get around to doing that. But I want to actually get blog posts out more frequently! Next I will be writing about several small toys I have been making in Processing.