ROLE
Programmer
DESCRIPTION
This game is made during a short game jam at Södertörns University.
A very small game about a racoon that helps a sad girl. You collect differnt colored crayons that colores the world.
We won 3 awards out of four. Best design, best game and best idea.
YEAR
2022
TEAM
3 people
GENRE
Cozy
PLATFORM
PC
TIME
3 Days
ENGINE
Unity
LANGUAGE
C#
MY WORK
The theme was contrast and we came up with the idea to make a game that colors the world. The world is black and white from the start and when the player picks up a crayon it gives some of the world it colors back. The player has a photo album where they can see a picture where they can find the different crayons. When the player picks up the crayon the pictures changes to a colored picture.
I did all the programming for this game except for the player controller, it is Invectors free third person controller.
I also worked on the level design. Since this was just a short game jam i did not have time to do the level design as detailed as I wanted but it turned out okey in the end.
This was my first solo programmer project, and I learned a lot during this short time.
PROGRAMMING
I made an easy system since I was new to programming as this time, I made an array where I added all the meshes that needed to change its material. I then made it so that depending on the crayon the player picks up it changes all the meshes in the array to the new material with color. I used static bools to know which crayon the player picked up and then added the functionality depending on which bool is set to true. This is a very easy solution to a small game jam game but if I would do it today, I would use Unity Events to handle the functionality instead.
Even though it was a small game jam I wanted to implement a start menu and paus menu, so I did that with some easy animations on the buttons. They start menu is having a button for: start game, quit game and credits and the paus menu is having buttons for: main menu, quit game and credits. The start menu has a rendering of our character with a funny dancing animation from mixamo.
LEVEL DESIGN
The level design is not made with to much effort since I did not have the time for it. I started with the outside walls to limit the size of the map. I then added the roads and after that the city with the greeanry and vehicles.
I then added a playground and next to it a treehouse and a parkinglot on the other side. One of the artist then added a some extra assets to make the level feel a bit more detailed like a pond and a hot-dog stand.
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED
I learned how to solve problems on my own and search for solutions in Unitys manual and by trial and error. It was a really fun and new experience to be the only programmer and to plan out all the programming by myself.
It was my first game jam and since the time frame was only 3 days I learned how to get the functionallity working in a short time. I did not have the time to find the best solution on everything but I learned that I can trust myself to get the job done in a short time.
Even though the code could definetly be better I am really proud of what I could accomplish in that short time and as new to programming as I was at the time. My code was still structured with comments and not messy at all which I am happy that I took the time to do. It makes it easier if I would like to refactor it someday since I really enjoyed the making this game.