The last of the short jams...

This game will likely mark the last time I take part in smaller game jams as I am looking to work on some more substantial projects to add to my portfolio, that being said it was a ton of fun seeing what I could produce in 3 hours.

The Concept

I knew straight off the bat, If I only have 3 hours to make a game I don't want to be trying features that I'm not sure of so I went with something I knew I could make. The idea is basically asteroids but with a 3D low poly feel and a goal to protect the earth, with the theme being "Gameplay under 1 minute" I figured I could just keep it as an arcade game and have the difficulty ramp up pretty fast.

00:00:01 

Mostly when making games I use place holders for assets then swap them out once I have a working prototype but with this one being such a short deadline I decided to create the essential assets first to save time on swapping. I already know a few techniques on blender to get things done quickly .

00:02:08

So I had some brief understanding of how I was to split the time apart , I figured the less time I spend on models the better so I made a basic Asteroid-esque space ship and literally took a few cubes and added the subdivision surface and triangulate modifiers to them to give them this low poly rock look.

00:05:32

Off to a flying start I had my models created in under 10 minutes, I just added some variation to the rocks and used Cel-shatter to split them up. I know from game in the past this is an easy way to make things look broken in a game, simply de-activate the unbroken Game Object and replace it it a shattered version with a collider in the middle adding force to the pieces in an outward direction.

00:15:39

15 minutes in and I have my prefabs made , materials assigned and rigidbodies and colliders where they need to be.  Since I wanted this to be top down similar to asteroids my plan was to have a bunch of spawnpoints outside of the cameras view added to a list and have the rocks spawn at a random one from the list each time, once the rocks spawn I would just need to add some force and torque in the Start method... this mostly worked as expected but some rocks were falling out of site of the spaceship so I just added this simple line of code to clamp the rocks y position. transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x , 0 , transform.position.y) , easy fix!

00:20:20

Before sorting out the rocks scripts though I needed to get a basic player controller down , the idea of asteroids movement is pretty easy , take away the gravity, have the ship look at the mouse and add a force forwards when clicked, To add better handling I also added some return force by taking the velocity of the ship and applying it back to itseld by -X amount when the right mouse button is up. To do the particles effect I just made the size of the particles scale up with the velocity.magnitude of the ships rigidbody but only when the right mouse button is down.

00:49:37

At this point I'm cutting out a few screen shots , I had to keep stopping and starting the timer in between doing other things on my PC that weren't game related. Anyway I was onto the rock controller, I used a bool to decifer wether the rock was broken or not as they would both work very similarly. All that happens is when they collide with a bullet they break , shake the screen and  add score to the GameManager, if they collide with a player they lose a life and same for the earth , later I decided to give the earth only one life and have them only effected by unbroken rocks.

02:00:33

Skipping forward quite a bit now after a few bug fixes and tweaking I had a working UI and leaders boards working through LootLocker, from here I just needed to tweak difficulty, canvas items and play around with post processing and materials. There Isn't much to say about this screen shot just that I felt I had done a lot of things without screenshotting due to not much changing visually.

02:48:14 

Game tested, everything working and not really lasting longer than a minute I'm pretty happy , there are a few things I wanted to change with rock spawns and the violent camera shakes but I didn't really have the time at this point so I put my focus on getting a nice Gif for the front cover and then getting the WebGL build sorted.

You may notice an update I made after submission , this is literally just me getting the leaderboards to take the last 2 letters off when displaying the players name ( I add 2 random letters to everyone's name so that they can have multiple scores on the board with the same name, then I just remove the letters so you can't tell. As I transitioned from dreamlo to LootLocker this is something I overlooked).