Download the game here!

A forest in agony, and an unlikely hero.

Pang: The Tainted Forest is a reimagining of the old arcade game Pang, where you take on the role of a tiny rat, determined to free its home forest from the pollution that has suddenly taken over. Magical powers of the forest are by the rat’s side, as it uses nature as its weapon against the evil pollution bubbles.

The game features:

• 18 different levels with platforms and climbable stairs
• Multiple power-ups and different weapons
• Highscore system
• Beautiful 2D hand-drawn graphics

Development

We started the project by choosing the game we are gonna use as a reference, and Pang seemed the most fun to replicate. At first, we were considering making pixel art but ended up choosing not to go with it. We didn’t have previous experience of pixel art and we figured that we already had a lot to learn with Unity and game-making in general, and this decision ended up serving us well in the end, as we encountered multiple problems in Unity and GitKraken.

The idea of a forest setting with a mystical atmosphere came quickly to us at the very beginning of planning. It was obvious that the balloons had to be the enemy, and after pondering their function, one of our team members had an idea that they could be pollution. From there on we settled on the idea of the main character embarking on a journey to save the forest and wanted to showcase that with a small animated story.

During the first weeks (and even later on) we spent a lot of time on concepts and ideation. There were multiple ideas that we had to abandon due to lack of time, for example snowy and underwater levels with different physics, multiplayer support, a final boss, more guns, enemies, or additional helpful or neutral characters, and so on. The basic mechanics of the game came to be fairly quick, but the programmers spent a lot of time fine tuning the physics and making sure everything not only looked good but felt good as well.

Even though all artists were at first able to make sketches about everything, the dividing of the art creation happened naturally and in the end, everyone got to do things they wanted and also try something they weren’t that familiar with. For the character and the background, we had a voting system for the sketches that we would start working with. Around this time we also chose to make three different versions of the backgrounds, showing the player the progress of their quest of clearing up the forest.

After deciding to go with two different mystical forest backgrounds both having three intensities of pollution and voting the rat as our hero, it was time to also think about other important assets and their overall look.

Overall, our biggest problems had to do with our artists being new to Unity and Gitkraken. It was also a challenge to keep everything coherent with so many artists each with their own style. Despite encountering multiple problems we thankfully managed to solve all of our problems and ended up with a project we’re all very proud of.

 

Team Gamma Rats

Jere Joensuu – Programmer, Project Manager
Joni Nevala – Programmer
Janina Korpela – Artist, Project Manager
Mona Westman – Artist
Niina Lahti – Artist
Nina Lahti – Artist
Aura Solja – Artist
+ our lovely sound designers Deniz Kirci and Akseli Koskinen!

Game Idea

Rat Mash is our team’s version of the original Rampage. You play as a radioactive rat in a post-apocalyptic world to destroy the leftovers of humanity! You destroy buildings, climb them, and beat your enemies to make your way to the start of it all!

In the picture above you can see our concept art for the main character and below you can see the final character animations.

 

Development

When the project started in September we originally thought about making Frogger with a twist but our team also saw Rampage on our list of games and ideas kept flowing in for it. We chose against Frogger and chose to do Rampage since we had more passion for it even if it was going to be more difficult to do and the scope was going to be bigger. 

We studied the original Rampage, its mechanics, movements, and flow and used it as a base to refer to and improve on.

Originally we had way more things we wanted to have in our game but as time passed we realized our scope wasn’t realistic for the game we had chosen, and the time we had, so we scrapped a lot of things. 

Our process was somewhat rocky with having lots of bugs, a big scope with imitating Rampage and courses to focus on. However, our team is very proud of what we achieved and we’re very happy we chose Rampage instead of Frogger.

Team Monki Flip

Artists:

Emma Erjanne 

Joona Ljokkoi

Mikko Nystedt

Liisa Pirhonen

Coders:

Veeti Karilainen

Ville Karilainen

 

Download here

Going through all the possible options to base our game off of, we fairly quickly all leaned towards Thrust. To give our own spice for the game, we first decided to try to find a theme which would then shape how we approached making our own version. From somewhere came the idea about “bees with guns” which very soon evolved to mech bees being invaded by mech spiders. And that’s how Superbuzz came to be.

Features:
The game is composed of 8 levels with increasing difficulty, including traps and enemies, with the main goal being making it out of the hive with the queen within given time

• Honey hook allowing the player to grab different tools and the queen
• Gate system requiring the player to bring a heavy mech-honeycomb on a pressure plate to activate it
• Spiders blocking the way walking across the passages
• Spiders shooting towards the player
• Laser traps triggering every few seconds
• Fireball dispenser providing the player a weapon to hook and clear a path

Development

First things first, our programmers got some basic player movement and a hook mechanic implemented as they were the most crucial mechanics for our game. Our biggest challenges were very much related to the player character. In the first prototypes the controls were heavy and not responsive enough, making it unnecessarily hard to avoid collisions.

It also proved to be challenging how to make the player character’s movement direction clear. The heroic bee would go through multiple iterations as we were trying to figure out what would be the clearest way to portray this advanced pollinator.

Choosing to go for a color palette helped tie together our assets better as it was a bit tricky to keep the art consistent with multiple artists. We also put heavy emphasis on making the levels visually easy to read. Tilemaps made doing level layouts fairly easy, but also on the other hand easily left the beehive feeling a bit inorganic.

Sometime midway the semester it seemed the project came to almost a complete halt due to some unexpected circumstances that required us to redistribute quite a bunch of the workload, but we clearly picked up the speed towards the end.

Looking back, something we would have done differently is playtesting much more. Being worried about the difficulty held us back a bit from making more fun and daring levels.

Altogether despite some difficulties and not exactly everything making it into the final build, we’re still very much proud of what we achieved.

Download here

 

Team Jousters

Ilmari Huhtanen – Programmer
Marko Saari – Programmer
Néd Richard – Project Lead / Artist
Karin Aimonen – Artist
Joel Eklund – Artist
Katariina Paulaniemi – Artist

Our Team Alpha DAWGs decided to make a version of the arcade game Boulder Dash with a visual theme inspired by cyberpunk and Egyptian mythology.  We chose Boulder Dash as our base game because it was a simple game that most of the team found fun to play.

We made a lot of concept art before finalizing the look of the game, tweaking color palettes and the designs of the characters and the environment.

Development Process

While the artists were working on finding the visual style, the programmers created a prototype of the game. The early prototype had character movement and boulder physics.

The team started adding more as the base prototype was ready, like polishing and adding visual assets and refining the core mechanics of the game. As we were working on the game the team had to balance their time between working on the game and other school work.

We added collectibles, character animations, and the Main Menu prototype.

After ensuring that the gameplay would work without bugs, the team started working on adding in animated backgrounds, enemies, and a lot of levels as well as the Main Menu and other UI. The game also got a score system and a timer.

As we were already quite far with the game, we decided to add in the dialogue story parts with animated character sprites to push the story of the game a bit further. This had been planned from the beginning as something we wanted to add if we had the time for it.

While working on the game project we learned a lot about Unity and the power of friendship. The communication within the team worked well and everyone did their part.

The members of the amazing Team Alpha DAWG are:

Programmers:
Samu Lehtineva
Amanda Vanhatalo

Artists:
Siiri Syvänen
Coral Nguyen
Ere Kreula
Ada Ikonen
Erika Markkinen

Also from outside the team, we received music from:

Brandon Emene

Link to final build

Rift Hopper

 

Our team Sigma Katz decided to remake the original Pac-Man with a little twist. We wanted to add multiple different themed levels with procedural generation, so that every level will be different from each other. Travelling between levels happens through rifts, so this is how the game got its name, Rift Hopper.

 

 

Features 

• Single player 
• 3 different themed levels 
• Procedural generation so every level is unique 
• Multi-room system 

 

 

Development 

The project started in September. It began with a brainstorming, and we quickly got ideas of how to modify the classic Pac-Man. The basic idea was to make a game with multiple themes, new graphics and some interesting features. We decided that each level should have a different theme, so every artist can have something entirely their own to work on and show off their styles.

This semester was very busy and we had other very time consuming courses, so many of the level ideas and different types of power-ups were dropped off. Game is still a work-in-progress, but most of the basic elements are implemented.

This project taught us much and it was a good learning opportunity to us all. The most important thing we learned from this project is that communication and weekly meetings are important in order to keep on the good pace.

 

Team Sigma Katz 

Aleksi Karppinen – Art 

Olivia Koivisto – Art 

Tomas Wass – Art 

Santtu Syväsalmi – Art and sounds 

Otso Alenius – Programming 

Ville Vennonen – Programming