A 2D Co-op Puzzle Action Game made for Toronto Game Jam 2020
Takeaways
This was my first Game Jam with an open and friendly community, that also happened to be online, through that I learned that asking for Design help, makes iteration much faster. Getting perspective of someone outside the project, opens up the project to more ideas.
Apart of this Path was the game I submitted as part of the Toronto Game Jam 2020, which was being held online this time around.
For this Game Jam I was in charge of Programming, Game Design and UI. As the programmer, I needed to iterate and implement quickly due to the nature of being a Game Jam.
Apart of this Path was made with Unity in the span of 2 Days, and considered to be well-designed by TOJam organizers!
Process Work
Initial Ideas
My team’s first instincts through that idea was to make a co-op game. It immediately got us thinking of themes, objects and topics that had direct opposites. A few stray ideas…
Colour Swapping
Fire and Water = Steam
Gravity Inversion
Tethering
After a few hours of deliberating we finalized the idea to use the “Match-3” genre in Top-Down Manner
TOJAM’s 2020 Theme was
“Together but Apart”
Rough Prototyping
Before I started Prototyping, we had come up with the idea of 2 players manipulating the ground beneath them, in order to indirectly affect enemies. Via the enemies walking over the tiles.
The players would need to get the enemies to walk over the corresponding tile, a major challenge we encountered was communicating which colour/type was needed to defeat the enemy.
Eventually I asked my fellow participants attending TOJam what a good method would be, and was given the idea of “Stacking” the enemies like a “Pokey Pokey” Tower from Mario.
Early Work-in-Progress of base Mechanics.
Concise Idea
By the end of the First Day, I had made a concise Enemy Design and an extremely rough Prototype for the game.
This programming and general design, made it through towards the end of the Game Jam, with the remaining implementation being Art or Sound-based.
Finalized version of all mechanics needed for the game.