LATE TO AREA 51

ABOUT

A 2D platformer about a gamer who arrived a day late to the Area 51 Raid, created for the 2019 WolverineSoft Pumpkin Game Jam. You infiltrate the facility, and rescue the aliens and use their powers to escape. Each alien gives you a unique platforming ability when you rescue them.

DEVELOPMENT INFO

  • Developed by Seyhyun Yang, Michael Tilbury, Nathan Gualtieri, Blake Webb, and Dilan Huang
  • 48 hour development cycle (October 2019)
  • Made using Unity Engine

CONTRIBUTIONS

  • Programmer
  • Designer

POST-MORTEM

WHAT WENT RIGHT

  • We used Tilemaps to design and implement the level design in an efficient and quick manner, compared to manually building the level.
  • Tasks were assigned and completed efficiently, and we were able to finish the game without staying up the entire 48 hours of the Jam.
  • Mechananics were quickly determined during the early phase of production, with only minor changes going forward, so programmers were able to work efficiently









WHAT COULD BE IMPROVED

  • Death and respawn mechanics were implemented very inefficiently, with each hazard or enemy holding a reference to a specific respawn point
  • Collision detection was slightly buggy, resulting in jump counts not resetting, or ability cooldowns resetting prematurely because of events triggered by collisions that shouldn't have been detected
  • The tilemap colliders were not implemented properly, and in the final game there are several spots where you can get stuck between the colliders of the walls and softlock yourself



LESSONS LEARNED

  • Properly plan out implementation of mechanics before starting to work on them, to allow more efficient code and structures
  • Properly unify collision detection as OnCollision or OnTrigger to avoid confusion and buggy code.

CONTRIBUTIONS

My major contribution to this project was the design of the player's special abilities, implementation of the player controller, and the design of the final level. The first ability the player gets is the hover, which was implemented by restraining the player's y-position while the button is pressed. The second ability is the teleport. This was implemented by having a separate GameObject that is on a different layer to avoid collision. So, the player could send the GameObject through thin barriers, and teleport to its location on the other side. The final ability was the super jump, which was simply implemented as a jump with more force behind it. The final level was designed to be very difficult, requiring the player to use all the abilities in tandem, sometimes even having to cancel one ability with another. As a result, it was extremely challenging, but several players were able to beat it after practicing.