Gooey Castle
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Top 100 - Game Maker's Toolkit Game Jam 2019 (judging still in progress) Only One player may play at a time in this 3 player couch co-op! Defend the castle from the endless onslaught of evil oozes and protect your Queen! Manage your time and resources effectively by switching control between players. Fire exploding slime balls, collect enemy loot and convert it into usable resources, repair your structures and fight fires cause by exploding meteorites. Grab two friends for an action-filled, frantic race against time! The theme for this year's GMTK Jam was Only One. The idea of a couch coop game with time-centered mechanics is a tried and true one (Overcooked was a great success), however flipping the genre on it's head by limiting control to only one player at a time sounded super unique and interesting. With this mechanic you come across some unique experiences where players are coming up with plans on the fly (start firing, then I'll jump!) while also yelling at each other for control when things go sideways and the plan falls apart. Engine: Unreal Engine 4 Team Size: 7 (3 programmers, 3 3D-artists, 1 sound) Development Time: 48 hours Roles: Gameplay/UI Programmer, Design |
What I did for this project:
- Player controls and mechanics. I implemented all the code for our player controllers and characters, some interesting stuff includes: control switching, player aiming, wizard firing, scavenger jumping, builder water spout.
- UI. I implemented almost all of the UI elements of this game. I knew the unique control switching mechanic was going to need a lot of visual cues in order for players to intuitively understand, so I greedily took all of the UI tasks. Although the station cost icons that float above interactable objects didn't make it into the jam solution, I still took some extra time after the jam to include them and it makes the game so much more readable. I made sure all my my UI elements had polish because I know that the small things count for quick paced games like this one (lots of squash and squish, shaking, and fade outs on key UI elements like the player control widget, cost widgets, and attention and input failed widgets). Having the controls always visible for the current active player makes it so you don't have to pause the game and interrupt pacing.
- Main Menu. I designed and implemented our main menu which also serves as a tutorial for the game, as we wouldn't have time to implement a true tutorial during the jam. The main menu forces each slime to enter the castle, making the players learn the control switch mechanic before they get into the main game.
- Design. Design was a very collaborative process on this project, and I definitely was not the lead designer on the team. However, I did contribute on many design decisions and had a number of my ideas represented in the final game.