Summary
What did I contribute?
At the start of the project, I worked on designing enemies. During our sixth week of development, I reached a high level of polish on the enemies that I created, which meant that I started to move on to other aspects of the project.
The main menu environment, some minor optimization issues as well as a bit of modeling was taken over by me to help lift the teams workload.
What: Collection of microgames
Who: 8 BUAS Students
When: November 2024, 4 days
Why: Game Jam
Process
My Enemy Work
For a big part of the project, I was working on creating enemies for our game.
I helped ideate and realize the enemies during this time.
Vending Machine
A simple enemy that shoots 3 projectiles. This enemy was made in a brainstorming session with the team, and we ended up liking it
so much that we added it to the game.
Eventually it was time to assign our enemy designers with what enemy to work on, when we all had an enemy assigned, this one was
unassigned, and it was almost scrapped, but I took on the task of realizing it together with the shield enemy.
I created a simple prototype, my main focus at this point was making it so that the way the projectiles were shot felt nice.
Throughout the block I did a lot of testing to see how I wanted the projectiles to be show and at what angles they should fly.
The original idea of the vending machine was to have it rotate towards the player. I made it so that if the player circles around the vending machine, it would get hit by the outer projectiles.
Sadly our level designers could not make the rotating vending machine work in our level, so this was later scrapped.
The final product of all my work on this enemy was a nicely polished and interesting enemy to encounter.
Personally, I believe he works best in open areas, which our level sadly does not really have.
Besides the design for this enemy, I also created all the animations for the vending machine, these animations can be seen below
Shooting
Getting Stomped on
Getting Hit
Shield Chaser Enemy
A variation of our game’s basic enemy. This enemy is immune to the pizza, and thus must be jumped on to be defeated.
The Idea
I wanted to make a sort of modifier that could be added onto an existing enemy, this archetype would change how the player interacts with that enemy.
I got to work and created a sketch that depicts an Electric enemy, which punishes the player for touching it or jumping on it.
This concept would achieve my goal of making a modifier that changes how the player interacts with the enemy.
The rest of the team liked this concept, so I got to work on prototyping it in Unreal Engine.
I created an enemy that stuns you for a longer time than usual, and can only be killed with the player’s pizza, like in my sketch.
Getting stunned by this enemy stops the player from moving for a short amount of time, which feels punishing.
After multiple playtests, I started to notice that the players were more likely to attack all enemies with their pizza than they were to jump on it, as this was more convenient for them.
This made it so that my original idea, of having the electric modifier influence how the player interacts with enemies, did not really work.
After some thinking, I decided to swap around how the modifier works, making it so you have to jump on it, and throwing your pizza at it does nothing.
This is visualizes by a shield that shows up around the enemy.
This created a really interesting aspect to the enemies.
We decided to only use this modifier for the chaser, as we already had a good enough variety of enemies, which I personally feel was the right choice.
Enviroment around the main menu,
Set-dressing
One major thing I got to do for the main menu was the set-dressing.
When I was given the task, the main menu was nothing more than a wall with the logo on it.
In the last few weeks of the project, I got to work on a lot of different things, one of those things was the main menu environment.
