It's been a few days since the Global Game Jam and I've finally had some time to post an update! For those who don't know what a game jam is, it's basically a hackathon for video games. During these events participaints are given a short period of time (24-72 hours) to plan, design, and create a game around a specific theme. This was my first game jam so I got to meet a lot of new faces and work with very talented people. If you'd like to download and try the game we submitted you can visit here or view a gameplay demo here

What did we make?

The theme of the Global Game Jam was "repair" so the team designed a 2D game with the objective of repairing broken pieces of a dam. Gameplay is similar to that of whack a mole where random leaking tiles appear for the player to fix. The player navigates on a grid of tiles and presses space to repair any leaking tiles. If a tile is leaking too long it permanently breaks and the player is no longer able to repair it nor pass through it.

What did I work on?

I handled the game logic for the tiles and setting up the animations and art made by the Carlos Abdu. The way each tile works is by using a script allowing a 50% chance to cause a tile to leak every five seconds. Once the tile is leaking the player has five seconds to repair the tile before it is broken permanently and becomes impassable.

The Challenges

In regards to handling the game logic, initially each tile worked independently but that quickly got out of hand. By implementing the tiles this way it was possible for several tiles to leak at the start of the game. So I had to come up with a more creative solution; this is where I utilized Unity's parent / child system.

By creating an empty parent Game Object I could set any number of tile Game Objects as a child where I could control them all at once. I attached a script to the empty parent that grabbed all the child objects in an arry and toggled a tile to activate on a random timer. When a tile is active they work as they did before by testing to see if they'll leak every five seconds.

This introduces a few new problems. I still have a chance to activate all tiles overtime which eventually leads us back to the initial problem. To fix this I created another array that tracks how many activate tiles we can have, in this case four. If the script is going to activate a tile it first checks the array to see if we have space to activate another. If it does have space it stores the tile its going to activate and activates it. If it doesn't have space it randomly selects an active tile from the array, disables it, then replaces it with the new tile its going to activate. One last edge case I covered was to check to make sure it was not deactivating any leaking tiles.

Also because activation is still by chance, we could go several seconds before a tile is activated then several more seconds before a tile is finally leaking. To fix this issue I made it so that if either of the chances fails after a specified amount of times then we force the probability to 100% for the next attempt.

One last thing I added was conditional that activates all tiles at once. When the timer in the game hits a set point all tiles become active and the tile limit is no longer referenced. This was a creative way to make the problem we intially had a feature that challenges the player towards the end of the game.

Cut Corners

A lot of planned content was unfinished due to time constraints since we only had 48 hours to develop this game: