- Programmed the game's UI and menus, including options for music and sound volume.
- Implemented pickups affecting player health and attack speed.
- Participated in a collaborative game design process.
- Learned basics of C# programming and Unity Engine.
Project Description
wRATh is a project I created in about a day and a half alongside three others as a part of the Ludum Dare 50 game jam. I worked in a programming role, taking care of creating and coding the UI elements and pickup objects as well as coding in the music and sound effects. I also participated in the design of the game, which is based on the theme of "Delay the inevitable". The game is a simple top-down shooter made in Unity, in which the player must attempt to survive as long as possible against an unstoppable horde of rats.
Accomplishments
Objectives and Implementation
When designing wRATh, my team's number one goal was to create a completely finished product, a game whose concept we could fully realize within the timeframe of the jam. We had a few other game ideas that would have been really cool to work on, but we settled on wRATh because we believed that it would end up the most polished out of our options.
My own personal goals were to become more familiar with the dynamics of programming as part of a team, and to get more experience programming within a game engine. My favorite thing that I worked on in this project was the enemy drops. When the player eliminates an enemy rat, they leave behind pickups that gradually improve the player's fire rate, and the special rats drop an item that adds time to the game clock. I had the idea to make the drops move towards the player, but only when the player is stationary. The code is pretty simple, but I think that this one mechanic does a lot to make the game more fun and fair than it would have been if the player had to somehow maneuver through the massive horde of rats to pick things up themselves.
Reflection
Compared to the first game jam I participated in, things ran much more smoothly. I attribute this to the fact that I had much more programming experience this time around and because we had a decisive project lead at the helm. After spending the first night of the jam planning out our game's design, we were able to execute and finish the bulk of our project the next day. This experience taught me that being comprehensive in design and having someone with strong project management skills are essentials for development to progress at a steady pace. We were able to work in an agile manner and get things done quickly because we were all on the same page about what we were making and we all knew which tasks needed done. This experience also proved to me how much easier it is to develop in-engine as opposed to using a coding library like pygame. While I enjoyed the level of control I got building out my games from scratch in Python, the speed at which my team and I were able to get tasks done in Unity convinced me to develop in engines from then on.