GA Spring 2023 – The Gnoming

Welcome to The Gnoming!

Prepare to protect your ritual site greenhouse from pesky enemies trying to stop you…

Swing your trusty old hoe, plant defensive plants and stand your ground through endless hordes of enemies as they try to take down you and your greenhouse!

The idea
At the season start, we bounced some ideas off of each other. Some of us had ideas for more casual and relaxed games, some had ideas about horror game elements. We ended up going down a sort of a middle path, landing on a Plants VS Zombies inspired tower defense game with some slight atmospheric horror elements. The team had some differing ideas of how to go about with the whole tower defense mechanic, and even with that we ended up reaching a middle of the road type of an agreement. We moved more towards an open arena instead of a small and tight grid, but still kept that horizontal directionality instead of going to a full 360 arena around the defendable point.

Early development screenshot

Even before the project started, we talked a little about the upcoming graphics workload, and ended up deciding to go for a retro-inspired direction with a downscaled resolution and forced limited color palette through a custom LUT. While the idea allowed for fast work and quick iteration, it came with its own set of challenges, as visibility suffered greatly during the darker periods of the game, which were supposed be the highlight of the entire game. In the end we managed to work around these issues, but they still persist to this day to some degree.

Working with very simple lowpoly models helped us to create required assets a little faster than what we would’ve been able to do compared to, for example, more realistic graphics, which was another topic of discussion in the beginning of the project. We ended up sticking with it, and while some of us had slightly different styles of work, it blends together thanks to the limited color palette and downscaled resolution!

The whole gnome theme came from the casual game ideas, those being more towards something like Stardew Valley, and so we just ran with the idea and ended up sticking with it. A garden gnome defending his home sounded like a cool idea at least!

The Result
Despite a bit of a rocky development, the end result ended up being a relatively polished experience, although we’re still a little unsure about the actual balance of the game. We’re all proud to present the it to the world either way!

Download the game from here!

The game project was created by our lovely team Bluescreen:

Lauri Vahosalmi – Artist

Hannes Karttunen – Artist

Eetu Vartiainen – Artist 

Teemu Herrala – Programmer

Jesse Vuorela – Programmer

Inka Harilainen – Programmer 

GA Spring 2023 – The Forgotten Ruins

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

GA Spring 2023 – B.O.B & Cat

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

GA Spring 2023 – Cyber Scythe

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!]

The only time you see Cyber Scythe sitting still.

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

GA Spring 2023 – Malt Hazard by Team Börsta

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.

Mäyris in his default outfit
Mäyris with his 12-pack-outfit

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.

Model at its current state, ready to get scrapped once again

Malt Hazard download link.

GA Spring 2023 – Lemon Forest

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

GA Spring 2023 – Magigun

Magigun

Our game is a wave based first person shooter with an eldritch horror flavours. The player is constantly pursued by waves of eldritch monsters and all the player has to protect themselves are a couple guns powered up by magic. The player has to survive as many waves as possible, all the while the game gets harder over time. The player can find and purchase other guns and there is even a helpful merchant who can help the player upgrade their arsenal. The player has to combine constant movement to avoid enemies with fast kills to end the round before the timer runs out.

Progress of the project 

The inspirations for our game were Doom and COD Zombies. First we created the basic mechanics for a first person shooter game with a basic level. The level evolved over time and became much smaller but also more interesting with different routes and so on. The enemies are incredibly basic but about midway through we added our first implementation of a Utility AI to make adding considerations for different actions way easier and more flexible. Our artists were hard at work for all of the project with the models and animations (with multiple iterations over time due to feedback). After the midway point we had most of the mechanics down but we were still missing the flow and direction of the game so we worked on that the rest of the way. We reworked mechanics like the wave system to spawn in a more continuous stream of enemies instead of a fixed amount to keep the pace up until the end of round. By the end of the project we finally found a direction for our game and are satisfied with the result.

Images

Link to game

Magigun

Team members

Eino KammonenProgrammer
Tuomas AntikainenProgrammer
Simo KontiokorpiProgrammer / Artist
Ville NurmiArtist
Leevi OksanenArtist
Johanna SaukkonenUI Artist / SFX / Project lead
Jani RämöMusic

GA Spring 2023 – Lizard Lick

Lizard Lick


One Person Production

The game’s main objective is to eat as many bugs as you can within the rounds time limit beating the previous highscore.

This simple and clear game-idea would make it easier for one person to cover both the artsy and the programming side.

There was both positive and negative cosiquences from doing the project alone: I could deside all the functions and the outlook of the game.

I quickly noticed that this helped me with having a clear and simple idea and all the pre-production was easy.

The artsy-side took a massive fail and the game looks like a sarcastic remake of a 2005 miniclip game. I made quick mock-up sprites for my game objects, that I tought I would later update to look nicer,

-I never updated them.

To be fair, I did make lots of these horrible low-poly models in blender. I played around with lots of different textures but it never looked good. Here’s a couple examples from the head:

Also I ended up really liking the 2d drawing mock-up I used for a “placeholder”, so it ended up being the final version.


Game Features

Since I had the clear vision in my head, but some of the implementing fell short, I am going to explane the planned features, implemented features and features to implement in the future in three different sections.

Planned Features

  • Lizards eye movement
  • Tongue auto-following the cursor
  • Bugs moving on the screen
  • Timer for the round
  • Score counter for how many bugs eaten within the time limit
  • High score indicator
  • Leaderboard

Implemented Features

  • Bugs moving on the screen
  • Timer for the round
  • Score counter for how many bugs eaten within the time limit
  • High score indicator
  • Tongue auto-following the cursor

Future Features

  • Lizards eye movement
  • Leaderboard (with name input)
  • Easy, medium and hard mode
  • Multiplayer
  • App implementation
  • Infocards between rounds showing info about different reptiles
  • “Un-lockable” new lizards, also corresponding environments and bugs
  • Bugs moving more naturally, trajectory curves
  • SaveSystem
  • Maybe minigames(?)
  • Credit scene
  • More coheesive audio

How the features were implemented?

Bugs moving on the screen

I am quite proud of this one. The bugs needed a spawner-object that I could plant all around the lizard. This fly-spawner would pool as many flies as was set, for example 5, and shoot them on the screen. After the flies lifetime was over, the objects would get recycled and used again. Just like in the Spaceshooter’s asteroid example in Sami’s lecture. Since it really does not matter at the end for the game, but was just a reminder for me that I am learning something about programming.

In the future I want to change the flies trajectory into curving lines, so that they would not just shoot in a straight line. Sadly I didn’t have enought time for it now, but I have an idea maybe using Bezier curves.

Also a problem arose when I started to program the point counter. I thought the “point added” sound-effect would make sense to be attached to the actual fly script. But since the game object gets destroyed at the exact same time that the “point added” sound-effect should play, it won’t play the sound-effect… This was followed by many, many, null reference exceptions. This was resolved by adding the sound-effect to the ScoreManager script.

Timer for the rounds

The whole timer ordeal was more simple than I originally tried to make it. In the end I followed instructions from GameDevBeginner’s article.

Basically, storing a float time value and subtracting the duration of the last frame, every frame to make it count down. Then the float time was divided by 60 to get the minutes before using the modulo operation ( dividing again) to get the seconds. Finally FloorToInt rounds each value down and string.Format displays them correctly in a text field.

Score counter and High score indicator

This got a little messy to be honest. First I stored the highest score in player prefs, eventough I was in the process of building better SaveSystem to store all the data in a binary form. Also there arose some more problems, since the point counter was implemented in the flies script and not in the player lizards script. For the point counter and high score I followed Coco Code’s quide.

First mistake was when the AddPoint method came from the flies OnMouseDown function. Now looking back I should have implemented the AddPoint coming from the Lizards script. Anyhow, after the point is added, the ScoreManager stores this value and compares whether its higher or lower than the previous score. Previous high score is displayed above the players score count in the in game state.

Tongue auto-following the cursor

This was the last feature I implemented and it almost did not make the cut. I had a clear vision of having two points, one in the mouth of the lizard, one attached to the mouse position. And in between I would use a line renderer. This way it would look as the tongue would stretch to where the cursor moves… But time after time I would just see null reference exceptions. It would not work. Luckily one day before the final presentation a senior student would help me resolve this issue.

The problem was that the camera was never defined 😀 So I tagged the camera as main camera and tadaa -it worked. There is still this weird perspective warp happening when moving the mouse sometimes, but it works fine.

Features that never made it… But was so close.

Save System

I started to program a SaveSystem that would save player name, score and position on the leaderboard. Did not have enough time to finnish this tho. For now there is only the temporary player pref high score saved.

The Leaderboard

The leaderboard was supposed to let the player input their name and then display their score with the name on the leaderboard. For now the structure is there. After a round, a window opens where it asks the player to input their name for the leaderboard, but it won’t do anything actually and the score nor the name is stored anywhere.

Screenshots from the game

Main Menu
Options
High Score
Game Play
High Score from Game Play

Thank you for reading about my project!

-Derri the Developer and Sandy the Crested Gecko


GA Autumn 2022 – The Floral Descent

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

Juicy game feel!

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

GA Autumn 2022 – Blorbo the Cat

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:

Jaeryeong Choe – Artist

Hannes Karttunen – Artist

Eetu Vartiainen – Artist 

Teemu Herrala – Programmer

Jesse Vuorela – Programmer

Inka Harilainen – Programmer 

Say hi to Blorbo and download the game here!

>>>>>>>>>>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.

Early development

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!