CSR Classics is a free to play game by Boss Alien in collaboration with Mad Atom Games for iOS and Android devices. You purchase, upgrade and then drag race your own car against your friends list, the world and crews across a fictional city in classic cars.
Dungeon Heart was a game made in 48 hours with Alex Trowers and Leanne Bayley as part of the 2013 Global Game Jam game jamming competition. We even managed to get a good 7 hours sleep and got the game we planned to make finished on time!
Since we used Unity you can play the full game here!
The theme was ‘Heartbeats’ so naturally as big fans (and for some of us ex-employees) of Bullfrog we made a Dungeon Keeper clone, since Dungeon Keeper has a heart in the middle. The game was built with the Unity Game Engine using C#. I find Unity one of the easiest game engines to use, and it is the perfect tool for prototyping and game jamming.
At first we decided how to best split up the work. It was decided that I would focus on the code, Leanne on the Art and Trowers would handle the game design and jump into the other two disciplines where needed.
To start with I focused on getting a basic tile based map engine going, and we made a decision to go 3D. Leanne started cranking out some monsters whilst Trowers searched for sound effects and started throwing some particle effects together. Each level used a really simple text file to define each level layout, with each different character in the text file representing a tile in the map in the level. This allowed us to create a whole bunch of levels really quickly.
So I got that all up and running and then started to focus on the biggest, scariest task - AI Pathfinding! Whilst I knew about the A* pathfinding algorithm and how it worked, I had never attempted to write one from scratch during a game jam before. Luckily thanks to this fantastic explanation and some fixing of a few off by one errors I managed to get a basic pathfinding system working.
I then spent the next few hours setting up a basic AI system. None of the characters in the game were controlled directly and instead needed to decide for themselves where they needed to go. This was done using Dijkstra’s algorithm, a variant of A* to find the nearest target. For good characters their targets involved other creatures as a first priority, followed by the Dungeon Heart itself. For the evil creatures they simply targeted the nearest (in map steps) good creature.
The AI system also had a really simple animation system that made the characters jump and move between tiles to the time of the Dungeon’s Heartbeat.
There were 6 character types implemented in the game - 3 good and 3 evil. Naturally the good guys are sneaking into your dungeon and trying to smash up your Dungeon Heart whilst the evil player needs to defend the Dungeon by setting trapdoors (a last minute inclusion, but one of the best bits) and clicking on spawn points at the correct time. If you clicked the spawn point on the beat of the heartbeat three times in row then you would spawn the most powerful creature, two times for the second most powerful and once for the least. Mess up your timing and nothing would happen! The balancing and implementation of the spawn timing system was done by Trowers whilst I was sorting out the pathfinding and character AI system.
By the end of the first night we were in a pretty good position - we had a basic pathfinding system with good creatures pathfinding to the Dungeon Heart but not doing any damage.
So with the solid start from the previous day things were looking pretty good the following morning! The final day was spent implementing the final gameplay design making the two different sides attack each other by introducing an attack system and hit points to each character. I also set up the victory and loss conditions, making the Dungeon Heart beat faster when you are about to lose, creating lots of tension in the final moments.
The rest of the day was spent getting multiple levels with multiple waves of enemies working and fixing lots of bugs that had popped up over time. Trowers also got the sound effects plugged in and threw some quick designs for multiple levels together as well as the coding for the spawn pads. Leanne had by this point finished all of the art so was making papercraft of the characters in the game.
The final few hours were spent manically bug fixing, as a few hours before the end a load of really strange bugs reared their heads giving us an exciting dash for the finish! At the final deadline naturally the Global Game Jam servers got overloaded but we were allowed to put our entries on a Dropbox instead which we were assured would count.
A few hours later we had the judging, done by the very scientific method of whooping and arm waving, and we were positioned in second place. We were all quite happy with that as the competition was fierce!
In summary the global game jam was great fun and opened my eyes to how much fun a game jam can be! It is a nice change of pace from what sometimes feels like the snails pace of normal game development during your day job, since in your job the software you write has to actually work and not have some really nasty bugs lurking in there! ;)
CSR Racing is a free to play mobile game by Boss Alien for iOS and Android devices. You purchase, upgrade and then drag race your own car against your friends list, the world and crews across a fictional city in modern, fast cars.
Trapped was my entry for Ludum Dare 22; a game making competition where you have 48 hours to make a game independently from Scratch! You can play the game here. It was placed within the top 10 for graphics and in the top 50 overall, pretty good considering it was my first attempt at a game jam!
The competition theme was ‘Alone’ - a tough one for sure! I ended up trying to create a spooky first person castle exploring game where you had to escape from a Castle. This was my first time using Unity game engine so it was quite a learning curve. I decided to focus mainly on graphics and art over gameplay quality for this jam.
To start with I set about creating a basic tileset for the Castle, the plan being that I would snap all of the different castle assets together in different ways to form a much bigger and more complicated building. I created a castle wall, floor, ceiling, carpet, door, light, portcullis and some crates to throw around.
Next I got all of these lovely art assets imported into Unity and I started placing and combining them into a large Castle scene. This seemed to work quite well when combined with some point lights and some linear fog in the distance to make the Castle all dark and spooky. I wish I had known about Unity’s Lightbaking tools at the time as this would have made the graphics look a lot better! Creating all of these assets and getting them imported correctly took me most of the first day.
The final day was spent getting some basic gameplay working. This involved setting up a basic first person camera and a mouse drag system that would let you drag objects in the world realistically to allow the player to look and move around the world.
I also set up the door levers and the portcullis animations along with some tutorial text and a simple trigger to reset the level at the end of the game.
In summary I think I hit the target I aimed for which was to create a nice looking game within such a short timeframe, however due to a massively over sensitive first person camera the controls left a lot to be desired! I plan to focus much more on gameplay in future game jams.