SIE App Jam Day (2013) - Super Santa Brawl

Apologies for the delayed post but I've had a bunch of project work that needed to be finished which will be discussed later. 

Anyways, two weeks ago on November 30th the Scottish Institute for Enterprise hosted an app jam at Heriot-watt university organised by one of my fellow game dev students who is also acting as the Napier representative for SIE. The main purpose of the app jam is to make some kind of application that might have some form of business potential and other elements that are awarded are things like completeness, originality and how interesting your idea actually is. Naturally, as a game student, I used this chance to instead spend time making a game. If you remember back to one of my previous posts I attempted to also make a game at the same app jam but didn't manage to fully complete it and as such didn't do very well in the scope of the competition. Luckily this time I managed to make a bit of a better and more complete game and won one of the top prizes which were £40 amazon vouchers and a Raspberry Pi with case.

The jam itself lasts around 10 hours over the course of a day. Unity was used to develop the game, as well as this Unity had recently released some new features to support 2D game development and as such I used this as an opportunity to learn how to use them. The theme for the jam was "Christmas" and to keep inline with this theme I investigated some Christmas themed sprite sheets. I found one that had a fairly nice santa sprite taken from the game Daze before Christmas for the NES. The first several hours were spent wrestling with and understanding Unitys new sprite animation system but after a while I managed to get things working, a lot of my understanding of how collisions work with the character as well were learned from the Unity2D tutorial on 2D platforming which showed how to use the new 2D physics system as well.

Figure 1 - The final game

The game itself was based on the likes of Super Smash Bros and involves two players running and jumping around the arena throwing snowballs at each other. To allow multiplayer I set up and used two Xbox 360 controllers. This was the first time I had used controllers for a game as well and Unity itself does not currently support rumble for gamepads so to get this feature I used XInput. Using the right stick the player can aim the direction of the fire balls, fire with the right trigger, jump using A and move with the left stick. If a player is hit with a ball directly they will lose a health point, 4 hits results in a death and the player respawning whilst the other player gains a point. The rumble intensity is modified based on the distance of an explosion to the player so the further away the player is from an exploding ball the lower the intensity versus a direct hit which will cause significant rumble.

Overall I was quite pleased with what I had learned over the 10 hours making this game as it had been a while since I actually made one. More work is needed before this is fully finished and I will need to change many of the art assets but I will do this when I next get a chance.

I took some videos using fraps but I'm currently having problems getting it to actually work. As such the video linked below is an older prototype version and was only what was made within the first few hours of the jam. I will update this once I actually fix my movie maker problems.

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