Category: Uncategorized

The Forgotten Ruins

“The Forgotten Ruins” is an isometric adventure/puzzle game with a desert themed environment. The player is a humanoid fennec fox who explores the ancient ruins, solving various puzzles and defeating enemies on the way.

Progress of the project

The project started by deciding to use the style and game play of Tunic as a base. Originally the goal was to include multiple levels, but these were cut due to time constraints. To aid the player in their adventure, they can discover several abilities to assist them in defeating enemies and solving puzzles.

The theme was set to low poly desert as artists were keen on the idea of having a humanoid fennec fox as a playable character. This theme was also simpler to implement as a lot of desert themed objects are often very simple geometrically and can be covered in sand if necessary.

The development was rocky and ended up in a crunch towards the end. Several features required vastly more time than what was planned, and many planned features ended up on the chopping block. Moving to 3 dimensions from 2 was its own challenge and ended up costing a large amount of time.

Link to the game:

The Forgotten Ruins

Team

Artists

Alina Leinonen

Nina Korkeamäki

Joonas Aro

Programmers

Lauri Kalliola

Samu Pulli

Tomi Sepänmaa

In B.O.B & Cat, you play as a bobcat who is stuck in a mysterious, deteriorating factory, trying to find its way out. Travelling with it is a tiny robot, guiding it forward, its intentions unknown. B.O.B & Cat is a love letter to early 2000 era action adventure/platformer games such as Ratchet & Clank and the Sly Cooper series. Explore an interesting location, collect hidden trophies and smash enemy robots to bits in this action platforming epic!

Development process

It all started with an admiration towards the aforementioned PlayStation 2 era video games. We wanted to recreate the feeling we had when we played those games as kids. The first thing decided was the character, or rather, characters. It just simply would not be a PS2 era inspired action adventure/platforming game without an anthropomorphic animal as the main character. There is no “Ratchet & Clank” without Ratchet, nor is there “Jak & Daxter” without Jak. However, those games also would not be the same without the trusty companions. That’s why we created B.O.B, a small robot that follows the player around, helping them make sense of the bizarre and spooky world they have found themselves in.

After deciding on the characters and tone, we needed to agree on which gameplay elements we would implement from the games. Jumping, running and attacking were obvious ones since all of the games have those. We also needed a way to interact with the world, something unique to our game. The answer laid in the robot companion. In the game, B.O.B is used to help open doors and battle enemies. It can smash itself into fuse boxes and enemies alike, causing damage to any and all circuitry it comes in contact with.

Other than being a wrecking ball, B.O.B also provides helpful and, at times, humorous commentary on the events that transpire when Cat traverses through the dangerous obstacles in the rundown factory. We wanted to have a rich and unique narrative to our game, but were quite held back by the time we had. Since we had no time to implement npcs, not to even mention cutscenes, we had to focus on making sure we can tell a cohesive story with just the environment and a couple of dialogue lines from B.O.B. We would like to think we did well and the game certainly does have an unique vibe to it.

All in all, there is absolutely tons of things we didn’t have time to add, but we as a team are happy with how the game turned out. For a new player there is more than 30 minutes of exploring, dodging obstacles, jumping from platform to another, collecting two different kinds of collectibles, fighting enemies and solving puzzles! Test it out for yourself in the link below!

https://team-bob.itch.io/bob-cat

The people who made the magic happen

Niko Holopainen: Project lead, level design, programming

Joonas Järvinen: Programming, level design

Pasi Sundelin: Programming, audio

Joey Audi: 3D art, level design

Vuokko Lehtola: 3D art, animation, 2D art

Aino Virtala: 3D art, 2D art

Valtteri Kamppinen: 3D art, animation

Just you and your scythe against the AI that has taken over…

It’s the typical story, really. The world has fallen into a dystopia governed by an evil AI, and you, the titular Cyber Scythe, with your titular Cyber Scythe, are the only one who can stand against the oppressive robot overlords. Can you get through the levels and find the mastermind AI behind it all?

[Download the game at itch.io!]

Based on classic PS2/Xbox era platformers, Cyber Scythe by Team 404 combines platforming and light combat, and features an unique, eyecatching aesthetic with plenty of fun details to spot.

It’s like a spooky rave church, but it works. – Gareth Noyce, 2023

As with the team’s previous game, Mänteater, the theme (in this case, “neon medieval cyberpunk”) was settled on early, and the artists set to make the style happen as the programmers started building up the basics. The very basic blocks of the game were built early and fast, but around the mid-season the game started to slow down, causing some troubles finding enough time to finish everything needed. Still, the towards the end the team managed to pull together a working game, learning a lot in the process — about Unity, 3d artwork creation, game design… themselves? The real Cyber Scythe was inside you all along.

There are numerous tweaks, polishes and cleaning up one could still do, but even without them the game works as intended, and offers the player a fun, short action platformer experience, that has an unique look, small environment-based narrative and clear progression.

This game was created as a part of TAMK Games Academy 2023 Spring Semester by a team of six students.
Programming: Eetu Hentunen, Jesse Leppä, Kristian Törmä
Art: Nika Toikka, Ronja Heimonen, SM Aho

Team

👨‍💻 Programmers: Ville Lehdonkangas and Juuso Kemppainen
🎨 Artists: Jonna Pentti and Oskari Ojala

Idea

Our idea was to create a simple arcade game. The player would accumulate score by reaching the top end of one of three track platforms, while avoiding hazards which traverse through the track platform it was spawned on and which will eventually fall off of. The track platform would have speed value which increases after the respective top end has been reached by the player, which would pull the player towards the track platform’s bottom end and ultimately to their death.

Upon starting the run and after reaching a top end of a track platform the player would be positioned on safe platform where the player could move sideways and choose a track platform to jump on top of.

It was planned that, after the player reaches every track platform’s top end the length of the track platforms would increase. This feature was scrapped.

Power-ups weren’t planned. Player having multiple lives wasn’t planned, but made to the final build.

It was agreed, that the player character would be a dachshund, the hazards would be rolling barrels and at the top end of a track platform would be beer to represent the goal.

Development process

The development of the project was active right off the bat, which was rendered nonexistent, because there wasn’t enough planning, communication and/or feedback, until the second to last weekend before deadline.

The core gameplay was implemented before the deactivation of development and the rest was implemented after the reactivation of development.

Art

There’s not much to tell about the art, as one of the artists fell very ill and had to leave for a long sick leave, thus being incapable of working.
There was concept art of the cute Dachshund, “Mäyris”, that was supposed to have multiple outfit choices, such as a literal “mäyräkoira”, a 12-pack of beer.

The artist did start to model the dog, but soon realized they didn’t have enough time to finish it due the deadline, as they faced some problems with the model and had to start from scratch couple of times.

Malt Hazard download link.

The game

Lemon Forest is a 3D game we created for the Spring Semester of Games Academy. This was an original social simulation game concept, referencing other similar games like Animal Crossing by Nintendo and casual, chill mobile games such as Cats & Soup.

The game’s idea is to do quests for your village friends, gain currency to buy items to accomplish other quests and to buy stuff to customize your own character. Some of your village friends might only have secret quests for you during the night! If you’re more of an adventurer, you can also roam around the island and visit the lighthouse.

Our plan was to make a relaxing and a simple game with focus on dialogue, customizing the player character, and upgrading the village with new items. From the very beginning everyone was very interested in this concept, and we came up with all sorts of unique ideas for the main character’s background story and how we wanted the game to look like. In the end we decided to go for a less crazy fantasy magical, to more dreamy, fairytale-like forest. Few copyright free sounds were added, but otherwise everything else was our production.

Below are some concept art of the game:

Design/development process

The artists began by illustrating their ideas. Our plans were quite big so there was a lot to design. We divided the work based on what each of us wanted to learn and focus on during the Spring. Some concentrated more on the environmental aspects and some more on the characters. Midway we divided even more for UI design, animation and storytelling. Regardless, everyone kept up communication and found something they wanted to do and learn.

How well did we accomplish our goals?

Our team agreed that the course work concentrated a lot on more realistic style modeling and since our game was very cartoony, we had to search more answers from the internet instead. Our main issue was lack of coordination due to a lack of leadership, and a very big scope, so we didn’t manage to implement everything we planned.

However, the game turned out cute with fun quests! It’s playable, and that’s what we aimed for. Everyone got the chance to try something new and learn a lot from it, which we think is most important as a student project.

Overall the project was a good opportunity to practise teamwork and especially learning that we don’t need to do everything alone, but instead ask others for help. It was awesome working together and not getting stuck with things alone. The team felt a safe space to learn new things on our own speed and with our own limits. When someone was unavailable, everyone was always forgiving and filled in for the tasks.

Pictures of the final product:

Link to the game: https://aceyyyy.itch.io/lemon-forest-final

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!