Global Game Jam 2020

During the start of the semester I participated in the Global Game Jam 2020 because I wanted to strengthen my unity skills and have a go at creating a game in a time-sensitive envrionment.

We began with the theme which was “Repair” and everyone brainstormed ideas to see if anyone wanted to work on those specific projects. I did most of the brainstorming in my sketchbook shown below.

Once everyone had decided what they wanted to work on, we got to work creating the mechanics/ideas/design for our games. I chose to work on my own because I really wanted to make my idea: save the trees. So I started writing out the mechanics in my sketchbook.

I created the essential experience to keep focus through the project and outlined the main goal of the game. This then lead to the basic gameplay loop.

Since this is the first time I had ever made a top down game I watched some videos during the game jam that helped me to understand and create the top-down movement.

Once I had the movement in place, I moved onto thinking about how the “put fire out” mechanic would work. I decided on using particle effects to display the water that the player would use to douse the fire. This decision was made to save time as I wouldn’t have to create a water animation.

A simple to-do list was kept to see if I needed to reduce the scope of the project at any point. And quite a lot of bug fixing was noted in my sketchbook too.

Once the bugs for the “put fire out mechanic” were fixed, I was beginning to run short on time, so I wanted to create some level design for the players to experience this mechanic in.

During this project a large scale fire was spreading across australia and it inspired me to base the level design upon the map of australias wildfires. So I placed burning trees in the same rough direction as the ones on the wildfire map.

I created a really simple top-down tileset for this game to use and used a pre-made character as I did not have the time on my own to create one. I created the trees myself as well as the title screen, fire icons and sprite sheet for the water particles.