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Entry: Unity Course Community Jam – Game Mechanic

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Unity Course Community Jam – Game Mechanic

4th February 2018

I’m currently participating in the Unity Course Community Jam, a 17-day-long game jam aimed at people who are taking the Complete C# Unity Developer course on Udemy. This was the course that first got me into game development around 3 years ago, and something that I’ve come back to again and again. As game jams go, it’s pretty long, and by far the longest game jam I’ve ever participated in (the previous longest being Mini LD#58, which was a week long!) In theory, this means that the end product will be a lot more polished than my other game jam entries over the years, with three full weekends available.

The theme for this particular game jam is ‘Spin’. I wasn’t initially sure what to make of the theme, but eventually settled on the idea of an Geometry Wars-esque, multi-directional shooter, where you guide a ship around the screen, shooting enemies and accumulating points. The twist, as you can see in the video below, is that you only fire when you spin (rotate).

 

At the moment, I’ve mainly been working on the main game mechanic, so the sprites are simply placeholders, and enemies currently cannot damage the player. However, I’m quite happy with how things are working out. Firing occurs at a constant rate whilst the player is rotating. Enemies spawn at random intervals that gradually get shorter and short (making the game more difficult over time). My next step will be to create a scoring system and enemy-player collisions.

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