Game Idea

We swooped into our final GC21 project hungering for an FPS game, since none of the team members had worked on one before, but all of us had a special place in our hearts for the genre. For inspiration, we peered quite far into the past;  to the days of Quake and Unreal Tournament, where the polygons were few and the gameplay fast.

Dual wielding and gliding became a core part of the player’s arsenal, since we wanted to have a thing or two to differentiate our game from most games in the genre being published, even if neither of those things – on their own – were anything new or unique.

So that’s how Transgressor crawled out of its sarcophagus.

With a lot of shooting comes a lot of tomato sauce, so what better theme to go with than vampires? Choosing to be a bit more Legacy of Kain than Twilight, our designs took influence from both the ancient and the gothic, feral and civilized. We wanted the player character to tower over most enemies as they rained carnage across the level, be it on foot or leather wings, and made you feel like a god playing 4D chess with mere mortals.

Also – perks of being a vampiric creature – bathing in the blood of your enemies heals you, and if you miss the showers, you can always pop their corpses like human-sized pimples with a melee attack. Neat.

Development

We hit the ground running on the first week, where our programmers created a strong framework on which the rest of the game was promptly built; at least on the technical side of things. Since we were about to move fast and shoot hard, a lot of testing and thought had to go into not just designing the level, but making sure it felt as good as possible to traverse.

For one of the programmers, it was the first time trying out Unity’s NavMesh system for the AI navigation, which proved to be a bit challenging, especially in a game where the platforms are large and far between and there’s a considerable amount of verticality to take into account. We also got to try out some of the shader graph basics and now understand what kind of things can be done with it and how it could be utilized in the future.

On the art side of things, plenty of firsts were also experienced; our character/weapons artist had minimal experience with Blender – or 3D modelling in overall – and a lot of things had to be studied up and learnt while working on the assets. Naturally, crafting a larger scale environment also had its own struggles and challenges to overcome.

A few weeks into the project, it became very clear to us that this was something we’d love to work just a bit longer on, and thus paced our work accordingly. This, however, meant that the game wouldn’t be “finished” during the summer, but rather, we set our sights on an itch.io release later in the year.

Team:

Eetu Pohja: Programmer

Heikki Gauffin: Programmer

Katariina Paulaniemi: Artist

Lauri Kullas: Artist, Audio

 

Download the latest build on

Google Drive

Itch.io: TBA

Azimuth is an isometric hack ‘n’ slash game where the player is a brave treasure hunter who explores the dry air pockets in order to find the secrets of underwater ruins. The path to the secrets isn’t easy since countless enemies will try to stop the player from advancing. We were heavily inspired by a video game named “Hades” and brainstormed until we ended up making hack ‘n’ slash with an underwater/Atlantis theme.

Our original plan was to create a game where you go through levels in randomized order until you reach a boss fight room which would have been the last level but due to time restrictions we had to drop the idea. Instead the player can now go through as many randomized level loops as they can before they die. The task might sound simple but the enemies get tougher and more dangerous after each loop – how far can you get?

Our programmers faced a challenge with the isometric perspective regarding the movement and visibility in levels. How to make sure that the player hits correct targets upon clicking the screen and how to make sure that enemies don’t hide behind walls where the player can’t see them. These didn’t stop us and we found answers to all our troubles.

The game’s theme and looks caused problems among the artists. Initially the game’s theme was supposed to be a mix of Atlantis and Bioshock/steampunk but none of the artists had much experience with steampunk. After many discussions, we slided away from steampunk and more towards art nouveau which turned out well.

In the end we are pleased with how the game turned out and it was a great learning experience for the whole team.

 

Team

Eero Salmi: Programming, Audio

Laura Huovinen: Programming

Jirko Haapapuro: Graphic Design, Animation, Level Design, Character Design

Juho Mansikka: Graphic Design, Animation, Character Design, Particle VFX

Ada Ikonen: Graphic Design, Environmental Design

 

Download here

Game Idea

Idea to make a bullet hell style, danmaku inspired shooter had been brewing inside the head of one team member and this was the perfect chance to try it out. Everyone thought that this type of game would offer a lot of interesting challenges and opportunities to learn, while being reasonable to complete in our time limit.
For the art style we took inspiration from NES style pixel art and cartoon series like Adventure time and Owlhouse. We wanted the color to be more nuanced and muted compared to the 16 bit era to give the game a modern look.
Gameplay wise we took inspiration from games like Touhou 7, Jamestown and MegaMan. From Touhou we studied boss design and took notes on how the game uses music to elevate the gameplay. Jamestown served as a good reference on how to keep more muted colors readable and clear. Megaman was there mostly for the vibe.

Development

The development process ran smoothly throughout the whole process and gave a lot of valuable opportunities to learn. With the game having a lot of moving parts the developers had to learn how to keep the code organized and clear. Building solid tools for content creation was crucial for reaching the finish line. We learned quite early that getting all the parts is only a minor part of the development process. Most of our time was spent tweaking things and trying to find a good balance for the game. The small details that make a game satisfying to play seemed to take as much time as we were willing to dedicate to them.

We had to learn how to keep the graphics compatible and consistent between two artists. The moodboard design document helped with this greatly. It allowed us to have a reference point and thus keep the style consistent and true to the vision we had.

The moodboard in question (the bird being the most important component):

First the looping of the background art was challenging but it was resolved easily and some graphics had to be removed and changed later to more suitable ones but as always the best result comes via testing and learning. The biggest challenge apart from consistency was keeping the art easy to read as the gameplay could be rather hectic and the ability to separate enemy bullets from the background was paramount.

In the end we’re very happy both with the end result and with what we learned along the way.

Play it here: TBA

Team Members:

Kaarlo Kangas: Project lead, Programmer, Audio
Ville Karilainen: Programmer
Joona Ljokkoi: Artist
Samu Hujanen: Artist

Game idea

Our idea for the game was to create a 2D Wave Based Survival game set in an abandoned space station filled with aliens. You as the player take the role of a Mecha and your objective in the game is to survive as many waves as you can.

Development

The development of the game started off with creating a prototype where we tested out the movement and shooting mechanics. Placeholder art was used for the first couple of builds until the core mechanics were up and running.

A week after the first test version was created we managed to implement the level into the game in which the player could roam around the station and shoot some aliens.

During the middle part of the project many of the critical mechanics were added into the game, such as keycards for the doors and giving the player the ability to upgrade their abilities and weaponry.

 

 Final weeks of the project were mainly used to add more assets to bring extra atmosphere to the level. Feedback for the player was a huge focus during the final two weeks of development.

During the last week of the project the team did some final adjustments to the game. Bug fixing and game balancing were not the only things that the last week included. Online leaderboard where the players could see the longest surviving players was also implemented.

 

Each week felt like a great leap for the project in terms of the content and mechanics. The biggest goals of this project was to keep the scale of the project in control so there is no burnout and for everyone in the team to learn more about working as a team to create a game and figuring out the quirks and secrets of Unity.

Team EezyPeezy

Aleksi Asikainen, Coding
Aleksi Hietala, Coding
Karin Aimonen, Art
Ville Raunio, Art

Link to Itch.io page