The Observers’ Ruin started its development journey as a horror inspired spin on the arcade classic, Pacman, but as time went on, ended up inheriting more and more features and elements from the adventure game genre – namely the likes of The Legend of Zelda.

With a core concept of a lone survivor, striving to make it out of a nightmarish situation, it’s up to the player to lead the protagonist on a journey through the corrupted ruins of their once beloved temple, using both stealth and three unique abilities to make it out in one piece.

The game consists of seven unique levels that progressively introduce the abilities available to the player, as well as different types of enemies and other hazards, on their journey to the heart of corruption. Abilities grant the player some freedom on how to approach different challenges, but their use is also required at several points during the levels.

Most troubles that arose during development were centered around trying to establish the game’s identity, or direction, as our plans and ideas veered further and further from our original source of inspiration. We’d had some trouble with the AI, and since it’s an integral part of Pacman, decided to shift focus and build the game more so around exploration, abilities and light puzzle solving with both AI driven and scripted enemies to beware of.

Also, our movement system had to be rebuilt several times in an attempt to make turning corners smoother, both mechanically and visually, which was only made more difficult when wrestling with Unity’s old (and later, new) input system in order to implement controller support.

Yet, somehow, we managed to rise to the occasion, and The Observers’ Ruin is in much better shape than the eerie halls and stone pathways it houses.

For the most part.

Team:

Lauri Kullas: Programming, Audio, Level Design

Heikki Gauffin: Programming, Level Design

Inka Kaasinen: Graphic Design, Animation, Environmental Design

Eszter Puzsik: Graphic Design, Animation

Janika Keskitalo: Character Design, Animation

Link to the game

Rocco the Raccoon’s Rolling Rad-venture has the player rolling around with a raccoon in isometric maps, collecting coins, keys, opening gates, avoiding hazards and trying to beat time scores.

Features

• Single player
• Isometric pixel graphics
• Controller and keyboard support
• Casual and relaxing gameplay
• Collectables and obstacles

Development

We took Marble Madness as our reference point. Original idea was to have a colourful, casual game with puzzle elements and 5-6 different biomes relating to different eras and cultures, e.g. Ming-dynasty or ancient Greece.

Pretty soon we had an early prototype with some simple level layouts, character animations and movement. We started polishing and cultivating the concept, but eventually had to ditch the idea of different biomes (ended up having 2) and focus on general aesthetics and functionality of the game.

In retrospect, we spent too little time planning and thus got stuck in the early development phase and brainstorming. The project was a great learning experience for all of us.

Team

Lenny Smith – Project management, coding

Juho Mansikka – Coding

Jirko Haapapuro – Animations, assets, UI

Jasa Paavolainen – Tilesets, assets, logos

Aatu Seppänen – Art lead, animations, assets, tilesets

Olli Heino – Music, sound effects, sound design

LINK TO THE GAME

Synthris

Investigamers
Aleksandra Pere, Programming
Mira Opukhovskaia, Artist
Ville Raunio, Artist
Toni Sundell, Programming helper

Game idea

The idea was simply to create a Tetris clone with a synthwave artstyle. The game has many of the basic gameplay mechanics which are found in the older and newer Tetris games (hold, show next block, hard drop etc). The player can also choose from three different themes which change the game’s looks and music.

Development

The development of the game was a gradual learning process of using Unity. This is very visible from the start of the project right to the final parts of development.

At the beginning of the project we managed to scrape together a basic prototype with some basic movement and art implemented.

At around the middle point of development more mechanics started to come into the game and the art also started to look more satisfying to the eye.

At the end of the project we had a ready Tetris clone in our hands, which finally started to feel and play like a proper game.

One of the things that really stuck to our head after this project was that some of the games can be surprisingly complex under the hood, in this case Tetris. It was satisfying to see the game slowly but surely mold together into a satisfying Tetris clone. Considering that this project was a first time working with Unity for the team, we are extremely proud of the final product.

Link to the final build

Penguin Rescue is a 2D platformer game where the player goes through different levels while saving their little friends and eliminating hungry dingoes. The adventure is nothing without dangerous traps, such as ice spikes coming from the ground and icicles falling from the ceiling. That’s not all; the player also needs to beat the timer on each level in order to continue the game. The player gets health back by eating the fish that jump around the levels.

The game is easy to learn and fun to play. The game is challenging but not too hard, and it fits well for someone who hasn’t played a lot. The timer encourages players to go for the best time, and what’s more fun than comparing the results with your best friend, right?

Download the game from this link:

https://shaakku.itch.io/penguinrescue

Development 

Our team, Hungry Hamsters consists of two programmers and three artists and we are all first year Games Academy students. Our mission was to make a 2D game by using one of the given old-school 2D arcade games as a reference. Our top two options were Bubble Bobble and Dig Dug, and after an intensive discussion and planning with the team we ended up with Bubble Bobble.

Pretty quickly it was clear that we would use the reference game only to generate ideas for our own game. Little by little we managed to figure out the game we would like to make; a platformer much like Bubble Bobble. The objectives of the game were formulated along the way, which took a bit of time to figure out. When we were clear on the objectives, it was easier for programmers to focus on coding and artists were able to start planning and creating the game graphics.

We generated ideas throughout the project, but we had to leave many features behind due to strict time limit. Our team worked well together, and we were able to discuss things with honesty.

The biggest issue we encountered in this project was the fact that we had to work remotely for the whole season. It brought new challenges our way and had an impact on all team members. Despite these challenges we were able to make a good-looking and entertaining game and that’s what we should be proud of!

Features:

• Running and shooting platformer fun!
• Rescue cute little penguins from predators!
• 9 levels
• Hazards such as spikes and falling icicles
• Timers in levels encourage speedrunning
• Get ratings from each level; replayability!
• Fun and sleek graphics
• Solid and addictive gameplay
• Controller support
  

  

Hungry Hamsters:

• Aleksi Asikainen, programmer
• Lassi Ojainväli, programmer
• Sanni Kataja, artist
• Salli Ruskamo, artist
• Eini Kuha, artist

https://tehn1ppe.itch.io/bomberfox

The goal was to clone an old-school arcade game, and we very quickly ended up with Bomberman heritage as the team agreed on creating an action game. We set out to play and watch videos of other Bomberman-style games to draw inspiration from. The main ideas were roguelike elements and an asymmetric co-op play, where players would have different but complimenting abilities. As the scope of this project for us as relative beginners became clear, we simply ditched the multiplayer aspect and concentrated our efforts on creating a smooth single player experience.

The first steps were creating some concept art and themes, and a simple game prototype. One of the early mechanic decisions was about player movement: Would we go for a tile-based movement or give the player free reign to run through the levels? We started early with a completely free movement, but as the bomb-laying and its relation to environment and enemy destruction became convoluted, we changed to a grid-based movement. This turned out to be too rigid for us, and since we were not using tilemaps in the game, the grid wasn’t that useful for us anyway. We ended up with an amalgamation of both; The player having free movement, but bombs and enemies using whole number coordinates, for ease of environment destruction and AI behaviour respectively.

As the art style and core game loop took shape, we started having a more tangible sense of the scope. We wanted to keep things relatively simple to be able to deliver a working game that was fun to play. We had 3 different enemies, a configurable bomb, a simple level and the player character, and early feedback with these drove us refining the core loop further with smoother controls, fluid player movement and animation, and more challenging enemy behaviour. Once this basic flow was established, we could turn our gaze to expanding the gameplay and refining the look of the game with lights, effects, additional animations and even a dedicated story scene.

Our original plan was to give the player some currency from killed enemies and a power-up shop to use it in – either when the player dies, or when transitioning between levels. Difficulties in deciding the exact mechanisms along with feedback given drove us to redesign this part of the game. Instead of recycling the killed enemies through a currency and a shop we decided to drop this idea, and instead give the enemies a chance to drop power-ups directly. Since the bombs were already configurable, creating variation for them wasn’t hard – the difficulty arose from deciding which kinds of power-ups would actually be useful and how players would use and store different bombs and bomb upgrades. We floated ideas between a single special bomb slot to having an inventory of them, and ended up with simply having 3 types of special bombs and a dedicated button and inventory slot for each. The player could only carry a single one of each of these, but they would be complemented with range and capacity upgrades to the basic player bomb.

The idea of endless progression in the game had been in the backs of our heads from the start since we had the concept of implementing something roguelike to the game. At first this was simply adding enemies and changing how the levels looked, but as the enemies themselves were somewhat configurable as well, they ended up getting faster as the player progressed through the levels. At this point we also featured randomly generated levels, but ended up using a combination of presets and randomly generated content to prevent creating dead-ends and unreachable positions in the layout – this turned out to be the easiest solution without using any kind of pathfinding algorithm.

In hindsight leaving the UI and menu mechanics to the end of the project was probably a mistake as it wasn’t as easy or simple as we thought it would be. The implementation of tasks like pausing things and navigating menus became surprisingly difficult because we hadn’t factored them in from the start. Despite this we got everything working and managed to snuff out or avoid game-killing bugs – according to our release candidate testers the game turned out to be fun to play as well, so we are happy with the results!

Eppu Syyrakki: Programming
Laura Huovinen: Programming
Hannu Timonen: Graphic Design, Animation, Music
Niilo Kajala: Graphic Design, Animation, Management
Pekka Juntunen: Sound FX
Emilia Mikkola: Animation, Level Design