About participating in GamesJamGAMM: Project "Heartbeat"
On the night from Sunday to Monday, the reception of works for GamesJamGAMM ended . It was a week-long game jam, where it was necessary to develop a game on the theme of “phobias”.
In this article we will talk about how we made our project for it.
')
We already have experience of participating in such events. We participated in the weekly game jam from NextCastle (which we already wrote about in Habré ), and in the monthly festival from Kanobu (a series of articles in Habré ).
Every time we started from absolute zero, used different technologies and tried to implement different ideas.
So let's start from the beginning. The topic was announced on Monday night ... (By the way, we must not forget that we still have the main work and we could not spend 100% of the time on the project for jam). Almost the entire 1st day we spent thinking about the concept. At first, nothing was born. Then the idea began to crystallize. With that, if both of the previous projects we did “from the gameplay”, then this project was thought up precisely from the idea, and the gameplay was born later.
The idea was that you play as a kind of scary creature that feeds on the fears of others. At the same time, I wanted to convey to the player the feeling of omnipotence, so that he with pleasure would kill the “pitiful little people”, etc.
Gradually, there was also a funny idea - that our monster also has fear. He is afraid of those who are not afraid of him.
Then we started thinking about art. I wanted to make a picture of some kind of “not such”. I wanted to convey the feeling that our turf sees the whole world a little differently. (Yes, it should be noted that ideas with 3D were not taken into account, because with him we have no experience and we would hardly be able to draw a good picture in 3D in such a time frame).
It was thought that the monster does not particularly see the body, but sees only the circulatory system and, most importantly, the heart. At the same moment the name was born - Heartbeat and the beginnings of gameplay began to appear. For example, the idea that we cannot determine how hostile a person is by its appearance. That is, on the space station where we are, there are civilians and military, but for us they look exactly the same. And you can only distinguish them by their reaction and heart palpitations.
With the help of juggling with brightness-contrast and color dodge blend, we managed to implement such a shader:
The artist sat down to draw a concept, and we (two programmers) started picking all sorts of shaders, lighting technologies, etc. in my free time.
By technology - everything is simple. We took Unity known to us, but a bunch of technologies unknown to us - such as dynamic light, shadows, artful blends of imposing post effects, etc. (the artist constantly asked to implement the blend from Photoshop in the build).
Sometime by Thursday, we realized that time was running out, and there was no game yet. There is some art and there are a couple of interesting shaders.
For example, 2D Volumetric Lights were taken, but the artist did not like the fact that there the lighting goes only in the direction of darkening. I had to pervert with the render in the texture and blending hands.
And on this light texture was hung up noise. It turned out as if dust is hanging in the air.
The monster itself did not want to stand out, but to make it an incomprehensible creature, but at the same time - frightening. The artist ponkrutil any partiklov.
At the same time, Andrey droo knocked us and offered his help in sound. We happily agreed and tried to convey to him the feelings that we want to evoke.
All week there were debris on the main work (the build was not going to), so programming was not able to allocate as much time as we would like. We came home and rushed to code. We slept for 6 hours.
By Saturday, it was a little uncomfortable. On Sunday, the deadline ends, but the game is not. And in general, it is not clear how it will be played. But there were still two days off. We spent both weekends in the office, leaving home already closer to the night to continue from home.
It was a time of peak productivity, but we managed.
Half of all time was taken away by designing the station and writing the logic of the behavior of the station team members. Artificial intelligence in a week, of course, did not happen with us. But with the help of a heap of different rules and waypoint it turned out to achieve acceptable behavior of the team members - civilians run away to the shelters, and the guard goes to check the sources of suspicious noise.
Not to say that we managed everything that we planned ... but still, we are pleased with the result. It turned out gloomy and beautiful. The sound also did not disappoint (for which many thanks!).
Deploy or build we are in a wild rush. We left the office on Sunday at 0:20. My head was spinning a little from unreal tension. We were in prostration and did not quite understand what was happening in the real world.
But it was interesting. Results will come later.
Team: programmer, programmer, game designer, artist and sound engineer.
Learn more about the project and play by the link .
The project, of course, is completely free and does not pretend to any monetization.
In this article we will talk about how we made our project for it.
')
We already have experience of participating in such events. We participated in the weekly game jam from NextCastle (which we already wrote about in Habré ), and in the monthly festival from Kanobu (a series of articles in Habré ).
Every time we started from absolute zero, used different technologies and tried to implement different ideas.
So let's start from the beginning. The topic was announced on Monday night ... (By the way, we must not forget that we still have the main work and we could not spend 100% of the time on the project for jam). Almost the entire 1st day we spent thinking about the concept. At first, nothing was born. Then the idea began to crystallize. With that, if both of the previous projects we did “from the gameplay”, then this project was thought up precisely from the idea, and the gameplay was born later.
The idea was that you play as a kind of scary creature that feeds on the fears of others. At the same time, I wanted to convey to the player the feeling of omnipotence, so that he with pleasure would kill the “pitiful little people”, etc.
Gradually, there was also a funny idea - that our monster also has fear. He is afraid of those who are not afraid of him.
Start of implementation
Then we started thinking about art. I wanted to make a picture of some kind of “not such”. I wanted to convey the feeling that our turf sees the whole world a little differently. (Yes, it should be noted that ideas with 3D were not taken into account, because with him we have no experience and we would hardly be able to draw a good picture in 3D in such a time frame).
It was thought that the monster does not particularly see the body, but sees only the circulatory system and, most importantly, the heart. At the same moment the name was born - Heartbeat and the beginnings of gameplay began to appear. For example, the idea that we cannot determine how hostile a person is by its appearance. That is, on the space station where we are, there are civilians and military, but for us they look exactly the same. And you can only distinguish them by their reaction and heart palpitations.
With the help of juggling with brightness-contrast and color dodge blend, we managed to implement such a shader:
The artist sat down to draw a concept, and we (two programmers) started picking all sorts of shaders, lighting technologies, etc. in my free time.
By technology - everything is simple. We took Unity known to us, but a bunch of technologies unknown to us - such as dynamic light, shadows, artful blends of imposing post effects, etc. (the artist constantly asked to implement the blend from Photoshop in the build).
Sometime by Thursday, we realized that time was running out, and there was no game yet. There is some art and there are a couple of interesting shaders.
For example, 2D Volumetric Lights were taken, but the artist did not like the fact that there the lighting goes only in the direction of darkening. I had to pervert with the render in the texture and blending hands.
And on this light texture was hung up noise. It turned out as if dust is hanging in the air.
The monster itself did not want to stand out, but to make it an incomprehensible creature, but at the same time - frightening. The artist ponkrutil any partiklov.
At the same time, Andrey droo knocked us and offered his help in sound. We happily agreed and tried to convey to him the feelings that we want to evoke.
All week there were debris on the main work (the build was not going to), so programming was not able to allocate as much time as we would like. We came home and rushed to code. We slept for 6 hours.
When is the playtest?
By Saturday, it was a little uncomfortable. On Sunday, the deadline ends, but the game is not. And in general, it is not clear how it will be played. But there were still two days off. We spent both weekends in the office, leaving home already closer to the night to continue from home.
It was a time of peak productivity, but we managed.
Half of all time was taken away by designing the station and writing the logic of the behavior of the station team members. Artificial intelligence in a week, of course, did not happen with us. But with the help of a heap of different rules and waypoint it turned out to achieve acceptable behavior of the team members - civilians run away to the shelters, and the guard goes to check the sources of suspicious noise.
Not to say that we managed everything that we planned ... but still, we are pleased with the result. It turned out gloomy and beautiful. The sound also did not disappoint (for which many thanks!).
Deploy or build we are in a wild rush. We left the office on Sunday at 0:20. My head was spinning a little from unreal tension. We were in prostration and did not quite understand what was happening in the real world.
But it was interesting. Results will come later.
Team: programmer, programmer, game designer, artist and sound engineer.
Learn more about the project and play by the link .
The project, of course, is completely free and does not pretend to any monetization.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/221155/
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