A two player split screen game made for the yearly Deakin Game Development Winter Game Jam 2018.
It had been a year since I participated in my first game jam. I had struggled to make a simple game in Game Maker, I left the jam vowing to get better. Hence this game jam acted as a test to see how much I had improved in an year. In a nutshell, this gave me a lot of confidence as I saw for myself on how much I had developed, from struggling to make a simple game in Game Maker to make a game with ease in Unity. We won two awards in this game jam: The Best Graphics(Art Style) Award and the People’s Choice Award.
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Theme
The theme of the game jam was ‘Duck’, so we thought of making a game inspired by the classic duck hunt, a death-match between a hunter and a duck. We chose to make a 2 player local multiplayer game for both PC and mobile platforms. I took the charge of making the base game and my teammate Rudra ported the game to mobile platforms and also added a networking functionality to it.
Design
I indented to experiment a Dual Risk vs Reward system where 2 players have one ability each - defensive and offensive. However the more the abilities are used the difficulty increases for both players equally.
For the main mechanic, I wanted to play around a dual purpose mechanic where both the players were given abilities to use to defeat the other, however over using those abilities would detriment each other equally. So the hunter is given the ability to shoot and the duck was given the ability to ‘duck’ and on doing so it would poop. Hence the name Duck Duck Poop, which on hindsight is like the worst pun we could come up with but in our defense, it was a game jam so it had to be silly!
These two abilities were then put in a Mario Galaxy like a planet, so the bullet would continuously revolve around the planet and was never destroyed. This gave it like a bullet hell feel as well. The poop was given the unique property to deflect bullets randomly in any direction. So more the hunter shoots or the duck poops it makes it all the more difficult to dodge bullets and stay alive.
Programming
We used Unity as the game engine and using C# as the scripting language. For the faux gravity mechanic, I first tried implementing on my own after watching a YouTube video on how the gravity for Super Mario Galaxy was done.
However, I couldn’t get it to function correctly so I referred a tutorial video by Sebastian Lague.
Art
For the art, we outsourced most of the models from Google Poly since both of us are not modellers. Getting the assets from google poly kept the art style consistent and maintained the look of the bright low poly style.
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