Purpose: Personal
Team Size: Solo
Role/s: Everything
Development Time: ~10 Weeks
This is an unfinished solo personal project made part-time over 10 weeks during university. My goal with this project was to make a small game from start to finish that has a polished look and feel and is made completely on my own.
My concept was a game where you are a child playing with paper airplanes in their bedroom and you see everything as the child imagines it. Their ocean-themed carpet has waves, the stick figure drawings are alive, and the higher you fly the closer to space you get. The goal is to destroy the enemy combatants while also saving your stick-figure friends.
Movement:
For the movement of this game, I chose not to use the engine physics and to fake it with a simple momentum system. I use 3 variables to accomplish this, acceleration, velocity, and momentum. Acceleration is based on the pitch of the plane and controls how fast velocity should change. Velocity is the actual speed and direction the plane is currently moving. Momentum is a value that increases/decreases with velocity and then acts to mitigate changes to velocity by the acceleration. This created the ability to build up speed to perform swooping maneuvers as well as the ability to stall out and fall backwards by going up too steeply or for too long. To add more control to the player I also chose to add the ability to “blow” to plane forward and give it a speed boost, as well as fans around the map that apply a boost and upward lift.
Health System:
I didn’t feel like a health bar suited my vision for the game or the feel of playing it. Therefore, I decided to create a hybrid health system of a hidden HP value and visible “hearts” style system. The hearts in the system are passengers on the plane. The hidden HP (currently visible for testing as the red bar) controls how easy it is to lose passengers and taking damage after all passengers are lost is a lose condition. Hidden HP can be repaired by flying through healing clouds around the map and passengers are gained by rescuing them from around the map, which is also one of the main goals of the game. The passengers or crew also provide a secondary function to just playing as health and adding to your score. You need a certain number of crew to use different weapons on the plane.
Art:
I am very proud of the art on this project, I think I accomplished a very nice simple style while still having detail that makes it feel immersive. Due to the scale of the environment and style of the game, I wanted surfaces at a distance to look like solid colors but as the camera gets close you can make out the small details which would mostly be normal maps. The main points of artistic interest around the room are the ocean-themed carpet and the sky mural on the ceiling.
As the camera gets closer to the ceiling the sky fades from the highest point first to mimic real life.
For the ocean carpet, I wanted it to feel like water while also being fluffy like a carpet. To accomplish this I used overlapping noise displacement, coloring based on height, and parallax occlusion mapping.
Sound:
As this game is supposed to be a child imagining everything as they play in their bedroom, I decided to make most if not all sound effects with my mouth and some slight editing.