TAMK Games Academy

Game by Sofa People

Grab your trusty shovel and prepare for pain! You are a young promising botanist with a passion for plants and a curiosity for the unknown. A plant worshipping cult has been doing suspicious activities in an abandoned wine cellar and you have decided to investigate. To your horror, you find mutated cultists that have turned into dangerous plant based beasts! So take your descent into the old wine cellar and smash every cultist or plant monster you can find, the fate of humanity is in your soil covered hands….

Game Idea

We wanted to make a Gauntlet-like game, with more fast paced combat including a dodge roll and lots of juicy effects. We wanted the theme to be Lovecraftian, and we thought about doing something post-apocalyptic or alien related, but eventually settled into a theme of a cult that turns people into mutated plant monsters. Our original plan was to have the main character be an old man, but later decided to have him be young and attractive. We also wanted to do a boss fight originally, but eventually decided against is because of scope issues, and instead focused on the core gameplay.

Development

After we had decided on the basic idea and theme, we started working on the basic mechanics and pixel art for the background and the character, as well as implementing the first enemy designs. Our workflow mainly consisted of quick bursts of progress, when lots of stuff was implemented in a short period of time.

The artists were consistently working on new art assets and animations, while our main programmer was working hard on implementing all the things. We also had a couple jam sessions, one of which was in person a few days before the final presentations which is when we implemented lots of things like the score system, treasure, power ups, online leaderboard etc. The team was also working very hard the night before the presentations, polishing the game and making more levels.

Overall the whole team was very passionate about the project and wanted to make something fun and over the top with epic animations and effects and an amazing game feel.

Download it HERE

Team

Onni Lahti: Lead Programmer

Rama Hannula: VFX, SFX, Programming, Animation

Axel Kulomaa: Environments, Props, Level Design

Eemeli Mäntylä: Character Design, Animation

Umut Soydan: Illustrations, Art Directing, Animation

Blorbo is all about speed. Inspired by classic bomberman, blow and seek a way through forests and caves, take down creepy ghosts and all while moving as fast as you can!

The game project was created by our lovely team Bluescreen:

>>>>>>>>>>Go to Itch.io <<<<<<<<<<

Before we even started actual development inside Unity, we set rough but simple goals for our gameplay loop – originally leaning towards more of a point system with speedy completion acting as a multiplier. This was scrapped reasonably early into the process, as we decided simplifying the score to just be the time itself. After that change, we started building around that core identity.

Development progress for the game was a combination of slower periods followed by crunch pre-presentations and especially closer to the deadline. However, overall the pace was steady.

The overall visual style of the game came together fairly quickly, and most of the development time was spent polishing how everything felt and fit together, making sure to have good visual clarity and readability. With a consensus on a simple palette and low resolution pixel art, the team set off to build the game.

We had some rough ideas for a really simple narrative to base the game off of, but in the end we mostly used that for ideation, with none of the story ending up in the game itself due to a want to focus on polishing the actual gameplay.

Arguably the game came together pretty well. There’s a working gameplay loop, which encourages replayability to shave off those few extra seconds to beat your own times. We’re happy with our progress, especially since most of the team had no experience in game development before!

We’re looking forward to continuing with our team on the upcoming 3D-projects, and we hope to enjoy the process even with some stumbles!

IDEA

All the team members agreed on making a vampire-themed game that was originally planned to be more Castlevania-like, but what in the progress got less and less Castlevania-like and more US-like. 

We thought the main character would be a huge Dracula-fan trying to get an autograph from his biggest hero, having to overcome a wide variety of obstacles to be able to reach him. (Thus the name Fanpyr)

The basic idea is to get through Dracula’s castle using a bomb and a rope arrow to create platforms to get over obstacles and to get rid of nasty enemies.

Core mechanics of the game are walking, jumping, throwing bombs and using the rope arrow. 

In the original idea, Dracula was supposed to be the end boss, but got scrapped due to lack of time. Instead, we created four castle-themed levels to get through by.
There’s only two types of enemies, spiders that descend from the ceiling, and some angrily scurrying rats. There were originally supposed to be more enemies such as wolves, skeletons and bats, but they got scrapped.
There were also supposed to be different themed levels like forest, sewer and dungeon, but as for now, all the levels are castle-themed. 

DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS

We got lots and lots of ideas that we all liked and seriously wanted to put in the game. 

We, however, realized pretty early on that we were maybe a bit too ambitious with all the ideas we had and it would take too much of a time to try to implement all of them in our game.
We ended up facing some major motivation issues and thus sadly got a bit behind other teams.
Many of the ideas had to be scrapped or downsized. 

Artists split the work and made some early concept art of the main character and some of the enemies.
Not all the enemies ended up in the game, due to lack of time.
The artists were a bit out of their comfort zone, as they were used to drawing cutesy stuff with pastel colors and rainbows, and now they were put into a situation where they had to aim for a darker style.

The artist who was in charge of the main character’s design wanted the character to look like a basic fella, just a normal guy fanboying over Dracula.
Thus he’s seen wearing a casual sweatshirt-jeans-combo instead of any kind of armor etc.

Programmers also faced quite a few setbacks from reworking object placement to use tilemaps, and wasting time due to Unity issues. Some features were downsized a little far and probably warranted a closer look early on, but overall a lot was learned about working in Unity and using Github.

We faced a lot of problems and merge conflicts, but luckily got over all of them as a team. 

In the end, there’s still a lot we could improve about our game, but we made a nice and effective sprint to polish the game to be as good as it could get with such a limited amount of time. 

Team Ihamikävaa

⌨️ Programming:
Pasi Sundelin
Ville Lehdonkangas

🖌️ Art:
Oskari Ojala
Jonna Pentti

For this autumn seasons game project our team Secret Cyborgs chose Gauntlet as the inspiration for our game Kauntlet.  

Gauntlet is a dungeon-crawler arcade game, where the player has to navigate through a maze while shooting hordes of enemies and collecting treasure. 

We decided to keep the basic mechanics of the original game and remade it with our own theme of Kalevala and Finnish mythology. 

Development process

Our team started by doing some research on Kalevala to find inspiration for our game. For our player character we decided to make “Väinämöinen” who is one of the central characters in Kalevala. For our enemies we decided to make goblins as well as “Louhi”, who is a villain in Kalevala. We wanted to make “Louhi” similar to the enemy in Gauntlet called “Death”, who deals a substantial amount of damage to the player.

 

After deciding on our theme for the game, the programmers started working on a prototype while the artists were working on figuring out the visual style for our game. For our first prototype we had character movement with some interactable objects, an enemy and a prototype of our main menu. 

After the prototype, we focused on getting the core mechanics in order. We then added different enemies, collectibles, traps and teleporters to the game. We also focused on adding small details to the game, such as some small animations for the collectibles to make the game feel more alive. 

Lastly we added some levels to the game.

Images

From the game:

Team:

Programmers:

Daniella Azouer
Jesse Rajala

Artists:

Maria Zapf
Jonna Lehtomaa

Tired of living in a hyper capitalist hellscape?

Want to just DESTROY everything you come across?

Boy, do I got a deal for you!

MÄNTEATER by TEAM 404 lets you do just that.  Based on the arcade classic “Rampage,” Mänteater lets you grab the controls of the titular Mänteater and wreak havoc on all polluting factories you can get your claws on. Eat your opponents, smash a spider-tank into pieces, collapse a building or two or twenty—how far can you go before you get overwhelmed?

Download the game at [itch.io]!

Developing Mänteater

 “Mänteater” is a game by “Team 404” of Tampere University of Applied Sciences Games Academy Autumn 2022 season. Based on the classic arcade game Rampage (1986), the player takes control of the titular “Mänteater”, a giant man-eating anteater, and works to tear through the industrial area of a polluted city. 

 The team landed on Rampage as their base game early on. There were other strong contenders as well, such as Joust and Gauntlet, but as the team discussed their ideas for the game, Rampage emerged as the game each team member showed interest in. Thus, choosing Rampage as the game the project would be based around felt natural.  One of the artists suggested a playable anteater; anteaters are very unique animals, and you rarely see them in games. They also make a lot of sense, as they are naturally found destroying “buildings”, namely termite mounds. The anteater tongue would also be a fun, iconic feature. Sometimes good ideas take iteration, sometimes you land on inspiring ideas straight away, and Mänteater was in the latter category.

Progress on the game was variable; we started out strong, struggled in the middle and then really found our stride after the second mid-season presentation, carrying the game into a strong completion.

Building a game was a learning process for the whole team. Everyone learned a lot during the project—how to scope, how to version control, how to work as a team, not to mention all the individual learning everyone gained from their personal area of responsibility.

The value of good teamwork and communication was something we found greatly useful during the project.

Maybe the real Mänteater was the friends we made along the way.

Team 404

Programming: Eetu Hentunen, Jesse Leppä, Kristian Törmä
Art: Nika Toikka, Ronja Heimonen, SM Aho

Bombaman

Team Bombaman was created in the beginning of Autumn Semester for Project 1 course. For our game project we chose the arcade game; Bomberman.

The game’s idea is to kill the enemies with bombs, while getting help from power-ups and getting to the exit without dying (single-player) and in multiplayer to win you need to kill all other players (maximum of 4).

Our plan was to use the core mechanics of bomberman and add a twist or two to our version of the game. We added a local multiplayer to the game since everything is more fun with a friend. We had 2 ideas at first: witch themed one and penguin themed one. We put it to a vote in our discord channel. In the end we went with the penguin one.

Below are some concept art of the game:

Design/development process

First the coders of the project started working on the single-player aspect of the game: getting movement, bombs, explosions and enemies to work. Then we started to work on local multiplayer side of the game, menus and other UI elements.

The artists produced rough animations and visuals of both ideas before choosing the penguin theme. We knew from the start how we wanted the main character to be like, and we had huge plans for scary enemies that run towards you or attack beneath you! In the end we didn’t have the time to implement it all.

Game dowload link: https://aceyyyy.itch.io/bombaman

Idea 

At the start, the team decided to pick a platformer for our genre, and we chose Bubble Bobble as our inspiration. We decided to keep the single screen arena feel but ended up splitting the bubble mechanic to 2 different characters. The characters are split between combat and utility form where one can kill enemies and the other can create platforms to help traversal. 

Development Progress 

In the beginning the progress was slow as we had differences in opinion with the design and had to iterate it multiple times to reach a satisfactory result. After the design had been locked in, we started the development. With artists splitting their work between Characters, backgrounds, and platforms. Coders decided to work a feature at a time rather than a rigid split of responsibilities. 

Midway in the development we were clearly behind and had to reorganize our team management to help members coordinate their work. With more clear roles and improved development progress we were able to get in the missing animations and additional backgrounds. After the slump in the middle, we managed to implement all the planned features and most of the planned artwork in the game. 

The game came fully together late and as a result we had a massive jump in quality between the last feedback round and the final version of the game. But in the end, we made it. 

Download the game

Team 

Coders: 

Samu Pulli 

Lauri Kalliola 

Artists: 

Alina Leinonen  

Lauri Vahosalmi  

Nina Korkeamäki 

GAME IDEA 

At the beginning of autumn we decided to create our own version of the classic arcade game Time Pilot. Originally the plan was to have 3 different levels set in different time periods, with a boss fight at the end of each one. By the end we ended up having one level with no boss fight, but a lot of other game ideas were fleshed out over time. 

Originally we didn’t have a very clear idea of how/if we were going to change the core gameplay. At a certain point in development we decided to change the feel of the game by adding changing difficulty based on how well the player is doing.  

The first thematic idea we came up with, and the only one we ended up implementing was the cyberpunk aesthetic. We decided on having a cityscape background almost right away. 

We wanted to keep the controls and enemies the same as the original game, and add new features on top of that. 

PROGRESS 

The selection process of which game to recreate started with combining all games and information/video in one discord channel, and through this channel each team member voted for the game they found most fitting to recreate. After we were done voting we had unanimously agreed on Time Pilot.  

We took our inspiration from Time Pilot, a 1982 arcade space shooter game. 

Proceeding to this step we’ve set up our first brainstorming session and gathered all ideas and content that we would like to see into a brainstorming chat on discord, we’ve set up weekly meetings and started working on the base mechanics of the game. Every week, we see the basic movement mechanic added, improved and optimized to our needs. On the arts department we started making the basic main ship, their bullets and then started adding enemy ships that just pass by. 

 
Some (very) early concept art of the player and enemy ships. We originally intended on having multiple levels, but the idea was quickly scrapped. 

After our first meeting with Gareth, we were enlightened with good feedback and improvements needed for our game. We worked on adding enemy ship formations, followed color codes, added better UI, a scoring system that makes you feel more powerful and after the second meeting with Gareth we went even further with these elements such as saving high scores, difficulty optimization and more speed and power and satisfaction.  

Our weekly meetings helped each of us work on different aspects of the game without overlapping with each other’s work. As for the sound department, we were able to produce our own original menu music and some original self-made sound effects, some other sounds were taken from a free sound library website.  

The game gets pretty chaotic at max speeds with multiple enemy types and power ups. 

Finally, by the time all of these elements were combined, we were happy to announce the name of the game itself “Tempus Bob” named after our original forefather Tempius Bobius. We did not only connect to the game as our own creation, but we connected to the game as if it as our own child. Provided that the game brings joy to most players, we were happy to feel excitement when playing, we added an end screen with a teleportation animation which added the cherry on the cake, and the pepperoni on the pizza. 

We concluded our success by writing the report and bringing us to this sacred moment of the present where we all will remember this game as in the past, but the beginning of the future. 

TEAM 

Programmers: 

Niko Holopainen 

Joonas Järvinen 

Valtteri Kamppinen 

Artists: 

Joey Audi 

Aino Virtala 

Vuokko Lehtola 

Game idea

For the July period of the Game Camp, our team decided to try creating a simple top-down tower defense game. We figured that the scope for the game would be reasonable to be completed within a month. All of us had played a tower defense game at some point and the basic gameplay aspects were easy to understand, all we had to do was to implement them properly. We did consider a few different games to be used as our main reference (like “Plants vs. Zombies), but decided to stick with more “traditional” approach.

The gameplay consists of enemies spawning from the bottom of the map and player placing different defensive towers on available spots on the map. The goal is to keep the enemies from reaching the exit on the top left of the map. Unlike many other tower defense games where enemy attacks are implemented in separate waves, in this game the flow of enemies is constant.

Development

We had several changes to the game during July, especially regarding the gameplay. We made small additions and gradual implementations to the weekly builds of the game so that we could monitor and adjust things in an orderly manner. Especially bug fixes became an early focus for the development process, since adding code from different programmers is not always as straight forward as one could expect.

We managed to try different mechanics and additions like mouse camera controls and tower purchase/upgrade menus. Probably the biggest difficulty was finding a proper way to balance the game so that things would not be too easy or hard. This required hours of testing and adjusting, but fortunately we also learned to implement our game elements to be easily adjustable. Also one of the major head aches was the functionality between the enemy pooling system and the tower targeting, these two components did some serious voodoo magic at some point that forced us to figure out how to use these two together without literally breaking the game.

On a general note, this project was pretty fruitful in terms of learning experience. We have not released the build to the public (and probably will not, the game still needs some polishing) but regardless it is a decent game for a Game Camp project.

Team members:

Matti Nurmi – Programmer
Pasi Sundelin – Programmer
Joni Honkanen – Programmer
Ossi Hela – Graphic Designer, Effects
Vilma Törmälä – Graphic Designer

No download yet, game still in development but it’ll be here… eventually

Game idea

You adopt a pet which isn’t like how you expected it to be, though you don’t really mind it. Like any pet yours requires food and affection to thrive. Other than that you’re not sure what else to expect. The most important thing however is that you have given your new pet a loving home.

KitsuCare is a virtual pet game for Android. Currently there’s basic care (feeding, petting and a pet sitter for when you’re busy) in the game. There’s also a minigame you can play to earn in-game currency and one functional item you can buy with it. You also have stats and achievements you can look at in the game. Only some of the endings have been implemented so far.

Development in 2022 (been in development since 2020)

After getting more feedback I realized some of my design choices were still well… bad (or at least too unintuitive), so I changed some of them for the better. Surprisingly many things needed to be tweaked and there were also some bugs I needed to fix. At the start of Game Camp, I thought that I would work on my game’s endings during most or at least half of it. Turns out even minor improvements take surprisingly long to implement, so most of Game Camp was actually spent on those and finishing working on one unfinished feature.

What you think you’ll work on next will be delayed for a while if you discover bugs or improvements that are a clear improvement in your game. I’ve learned not to give a release estimate after the two earlier years of KitsuCare’s development. The important thing is that I’m still developing it and getting closer to eventually releasing it.

My next priority is implementing the endings. After that it could at least technically be called a finished game and I at least imagine it’ll stop feeling like an unfinished game. At this point most of the work for this game is already done, which has made me patient with making tweaks and improvements. I want to release a game I will be proud of having made.

After implementing the endings I can start thinking about what features would be a nice bonus to a game that is otherwise ready. I’ve gotten great suggestions for potential extra content, and I’d definitely like to have them in my game (though I am a one-person-team and will think more about if I will add more content later and what would it be).

Team

Juniper Julkunen – developer