GA Autumn 2023 – WizWood

A wizard whose spellbook pages were stolen has to fight their way through obstacles and enemies in an enchanted forest to get the pages back. WizWood is a top-down shooter inspired by the arcade classic Gauntlet.

The idea
In the very beginning, we liked the idea of a top-down game and all the artists agreed to work on a fantasy theme. Gauntlet was a natural reference and a good starting point to develop our own game. However, there were things we wanted to change about Gauntlet. We did not like how the controls felt in the original game, and we thought it would be cool to turn the usual dungeon crawling into a more open-space world, which would also allow the main character to use a wider set of abilities.

The idea of progression in the game through the acquisition of spell pages was almost immediate, and so were the main character design and most enemies. We also liked the idea of having three levels with clearly distinct environment and we started working towards that goal.

The Process
The initial progress was quite slow as we did not have a clear idea of what the main mechanics would look like. The feedback we received was very useful and helped us understand in which direction we wanted to move.

Once we had the complete set of spells for the main character, it became easier to develop the game further by calibrating the enemies and designing the levels.

The work was mostly done individually at home but we had a weekly meeting to gather ideas and opinions and to help each other. Both programmers and artists had some major individual areas to focus on but everyone helped here and there whenever needed.

Play the game here!
https://overlunch.itch.io/wizwood

Our Team

Programmers:
Esa-Pekka Palonen
Oskari Kuusisto

Artists:
Helmi Voutilainen
Leonardo Fedi
Riina Koivisto

December 15, 2023

GA Autumn 2023 – Magic Mayhem

Seven is a magical number, and guess what? That’s the exact count of members in our elemental group! You’d think seven introverted game nerds would spend these four months being all shy and introverted. But lo and behold – we did manage to create something magnificent AND magical! We present to you…

Magic Mayhem

Magic Mayhem is a heart-pounding, spell-slinging top-down shooting game packed with wizarding goodness. Drawing inspiration from the classic top-down shooter Time Pilot, we set out to create a gaming masterpiece!

In Magic Mayhem, you step into the robes of Aurelius, an ancient and wise wizard standing tall against the chaos and destruction threatening his world. Brace yourselves – Aurelius’ closest allies, the royal spirits of the elemental realms, have mysteriously cut off communication and unleashed their armies on the material plane. Yep, they’ve gone rogue, and it’s up to you to uncover the truth behind their betrayal!

Magic Mayhem Water Boss fight scene — *Aurelius is badass – but so are the bosses!*

Get ready to dive into a world of magical art and sound as you journey with Aurelius, a master of magic who’s about to level up in badassery! Throughout his quest, he unlocks a vast array of new and thrilling spells. Each magical ability not only boosts his power but also arms him to face even more menacing foes.

Trailer music: Borgar by Alexander Nakarada (www.creatorchords.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

For those who’ve been with us since the beginning, there’s a wicked surprise waiting at the end of the four original levels! And if you’re new to Magic Mayhem, brace yourself for a few attempts—trust us, it’s worth it!

Ready to harness the elemental forces and dive into the ultimate battle between good and evil?

Yes, download the game!

DOWNLOAD

No? Well, shucks, we don’t take no for an answer!

Meet the Meihem team:

Milko Kurki

Game Design, Programming, Sound design, Composing, Music Production

Akseli Ilkka

Game Design, Programming, Boss Fight design & mechanics

Aapo Nevamäki

Game Design, Programming, Enemy behavior, UI design

Leo Piirto

Game Design, Narrative Design, Character Design & Animation, VFX

Minna Mellajärvi

Game Design, Level design, VFX, UI design, Artist-of-all-trades

Simo Vainionpää

Game design, HUD/UI design, VFX design, Projectile design

Kseniia Merzliakova

Game Design, Level design, VFX design

December 15, 2023

GA Autumn 2023 – Gho-Bomb

Dive into the twisted charm of Gho-Bomb, a Bomberman-inspired game where cuteness meets chaos! Unleash mayhem with portals, and beware – fallen players become mischievous ghosts, haunting the living. Gho-Bomb is a quirky, strategic adventure where gory surprises and ghostly shenanigans await. Ready for a cute-yet-gory challenge? Bomb away in Gho-Bomb!

The idea

Our team embarked on a creative journey to craft a unique gaming experience. Picture a 3/4 top-down and a 32×32 pixel art universe that breathes life into a cute yet gory take on classic Bomberman-style gameplay.

Right from the start, our vision was clear – we aimed to seamlessly blend cuteness and horror. How did we achieve this? By infusing the game with cute visuals and a soothing pastel color palette, only to unleash progressively more gore as the game unfolds.

Our game boasts its own set of quirks: portals and the transformation of fallen players into mischievous ghosts capable of minor sabotaging. These twists add layers of strategic depth and unexpected surprises to the gameplay.

Gho-Bomb is designed for multiplayer fun, supporting up to four players locally using keypads and controllers. It’s not just a game; it’s a social experience where friends can gather, collaborate, and compete in the charmingly twisted world we’ve created.

The development process

To get a clearer picture of the project as a whole at the beginning, we created a mind map in Miro. The mind map visualized how the art and code came together, what assets were needed, and what the architecture and wireframe of the game would be like.

Programming

We started building the base game quickly after deciding on the game we set out to emulate in our project. After our team had come up with ideas for our game, to make it unique from other Bomberman-type games, we already had a solid base to build upon.

Pre-pre-pre-alpha version 0.0.0.1

We, our team’s two programmers, worked together for the majority of the project. We would meet up at school to code together. This way we knew about each other’s progress and it was easier to help and share work. In the end we accomplished what we wanted and we finished everything on time.

Arts

We delegated the creation of visual assets in such a way that it was easy for each artist to define their role. We had individual artists assigned to create the UI assets and character animations, for example. Each team member would keep track of their doing using Trello and Excel. This helped us to visualize the progress we were making.

We had weekly meetings where we would discuss the current state of the game and what were the main objectives of the week both on an individual and group level. Most of the meetings started off with a playtesting session. Our progress throughout the autumn semester was consistent. Cool!

Download from here:

https://pommitiimi.itch.io/gho-bomb

Team:

Konsta Karapalo – Programming

Heikki Venehsalo – Programming

Aada Kymäläinen – Character Design & Animation

Eerika Launis – UI & Background Art

Milja Karjalainen – Level Art & VFX

Vanessa Leikkari – Character Design, VFX, Animation & “Audio Guy”

December 11, 2023

GA Autum 2023 – Teuhon Rakennusyhtiö and Jumpnaut

Jumpnaut is a game about taking back your job from the evil hands of AI. This job you ask? A construction worker of a massive space elevator ofcourse.

One beautiful August day, our team (Teuhon Rakennusyhtiö oy) came about the idea from a list of classic games. A Donkey Kong/JumpKing mesh. At first, it was thought to be more JumpKing heavy, but later we thought “It’s not very fun now, innit?” So we switched gears and focused more on a fun platforming game rather than a rage game.
Unlike the original Donkey Kong, the players of Jumpnaut could pick up items, throw them and even catch them in midair! The game could also be played with friends. So long as there were USB sockets free, there would be a way to fit another friend into the game.

The development started off with a swift playable demo right off the bat (Just a bunch of jumping squares but hey, a start is a start.) After this, development stagnated a little. Team communication was lacking so the plan became less clear. Time was passing by.

After a serious meeting, our team smacked some sense into one another and started working harder, as time was running out

Eventually with some sisu and quick wit, we finished the project. Some features were cut but most stayed intact for the final release.

JUMPNAUT!

You can download the game from the following link:

https://github.com/Teuhon-Rakennusyhtio/Jumpnaut/releases/tag/v1.0

Jumpnaut is a product of Teuhon Rakennusyhtiö (Teuho Construction)

Members of the team:

Programmers:
Juho Teulahti
Alex Yli-Paavalniemi

Artists:
Sami Riihiaho
Eelis Simonen
Essi Miettinen
Anette Sillman

May 15, 2023May 18, 2023

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.

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

May 15, 2023

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 Kammonen	Programmer
Tuomas Antikainen	Programmer
Simo Kontiokorpi	Programmer / Artist
Ville Nurmi	Artist
Leevi Oksanen	Artist
Johanna Saukkonen	UI Artist / SFX / Project lead
Jani Rämö	Music

May 24, 2019May 29, 2019

Games Academy Spring 2019 – All That’s Left

Anthony Vanoostendorp – Project Manager, Artist
Teemu Niskanen – Lead Artist
Nikolai Jonasson – Artist
Vi Viro – Artist
Teijo Lukkarinen – Lead Programmer
Sami Sipari – Programmer
Ville Heikkinen – Programmer
Santeri Sivula – Programmer

Additional help:

Pauli Ondruska – Audio

About the Game

All That’s Left is a level-based puzzle-adventure 3D game. You take control of Corious, a space-wandering tinkerer looking for signs of life, until his spaceship crashes on a deserted shattered world. The core game loop consists of platforming as well as solving puzzles using little robots called minibots, which Corious discovers on the first level. The player is able to send out minibots at any time and take full control of them. The goal of the game is to reach the end of each level in order to pick up a new spaceship part to repair it.

Development

The idea for the game was already decided during the winter break. We took great inspiration from Clank’s side missions in the game Ratchet & Clank. We used the holidays and the first weeks to do some benchmarking and find more inspirations for the game. Initially the minibots were going to be automated, non-controllable robots that would walk in a straight line before encountering an object to interact with. We later realized our game was nothing but a walking simulator and that the game wasn’t that much fun. With the help of a teacher of ours, we decided to make the minibots controllable as well and this decision really added a whole new level of depth and layer for the core game loop. After this decision was made, development was much more swift when compared to the first month of just pure prototyping.

Minibots

The minibots have three unique abilites; hacking, bombing and bouncing.
Below are gifs showcasing these abilities.

Hacking allows the minibot to hack consoles. These consoles can activate moving platforms, open doors, deactivate traps etc. The hacking ability is essential when it comes to solving puzzles, so put on your thinking cap and asses the puzzle in hand carefully.

Bombing does exactly what you might think it does. Make the minibot explode itself in order to kill pesky enemies such as frogs and scorpions. But watch out, the frogs can be unpredictable at times, so be ready to bomb them at a short notice.

Bouncing is a fundamental ability when it comes to traversing and platforming. Have a good grip of your joystick, since there will be some tight and precise platforming puzzles that will truly test your skills.

Game Contents

The game includes:
– Several control and volume options
– Save feature
– Intro Cutscene
– 8 levels
– End Scene with credits

We truly hope you enjoy this game project of ours. It is a culmination of 4 months of hard work.

Controls

This game is playable with keyboard & mouse as well as Xbox 360 controllers.

Move Character – WASD / Left Stick
Move Camera – Mouse / Right Stick
Jump – Spacebar / A
Zoom – Mouse Scroll / Triggers, Bumpers
Send out minibot – LMB / X
Hack – E / X
Bomb – RMB / B
Bounce – LMB / Y

Download the Game!

Itch.io: https://instance-games.itch.io/allthatsleft
Discord Store: COMING SOON!

December 22, 2018

Necrox – Instance Games

A mage casts a dark ritual to gain power. A chaos demon granted him power but the mage must also spread chaos and take over the land and so the tale of Necrox begins. The classic mage elements are now stronger but there is also the power of chaos which allows the mage to summon skeletons to unleash powerful attacks.

Project Summary

We created the game Necrox. It is a single player match 3 game with RPG elements. The game was primarily built for Android devices but it also works on Apple iOS devices. The game was created inside of Unity. The project was kept on a private repository on Github. Github Desktop and Gitkraken were used along with the repository. The code was written using Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Most of the art and animations were created using Adobe Photoshop.

Team members
Anthony Vanoostendorp: Technical Artist
Sami Sipari: Main Programmer
Nikolai Jonasson: Main Artist
Pauli Ondruska: Main Sound Designer
Tommi Pitkänen: Artist

The game is divided in two sections: the top section, where the combat between the main character and an enemy takes place and then the bottom half, where the match 3 game takes place. The player has to match tiles which activate the main character’s magic with different effects and the enemies attack at different intervals.

We completed our main goal, which was to create a complete game that can be further improved upon. Currently there are 15 levels that the player can complete. Each level has an enemy with its own set of combat base stats. There are 4 different types of tiles to try to get matches of 3 or more. The most common tiles are fire, which do damage to the enemy. Water and earth tiles are the next most common. Water heals the character and earth gives a stackable defense against the next enemy attack. Last are the chaos tiles which are harder to get because they are the least frequent but deal more damage than fire tiles.

The Game will be available on Google Play store but get the beta version here!