This xmas at Playerthree we decided to have another one-day game jam. There were no real restrictions but we had to work in pairs (developer and artist), the game had to function in portrait mode and had to playable with only one finger/thumb. Something xmasy was just a given.
Working with my colleague Hilario we created a game where all the Santa Claus clones were returning to the north pole after a long hard nights work. However, upon their return for some unknown reason, the elves had become angry, so angry that they had turned into suicide bombers. With their bombs camouflaged as presents, they head mindlessly towards the nearest Santa clone. The Santa clones, however, just wish to kick back and relax after all their hard work and refuel with a bottle of Whiskey. When the Whiskey runs out, the clones all die and the game is over.
The aim of the game is to guide the Santas back to the house and make sure they are constantly topped up with Whiskey.
Overall I was pretty happy with our progress we made in around 8 hours but if I were to have had more time, here are a few things I would have added:
- Improved the AI. Currently, the Elves move on a random vector, I would have liked to add some steering behaviours to them.
- Collision detection. Currently, it uses a simple circle based collision on a broad phase. Adding a narrow phase would improve performance and a more advanced collision system (e.g. SAT) would allow for more interesting level design.
- Line drawing. Pixi’s line drawing is quite limited, basic quads. This meant out of the box, we couldn’t have nicely drawn dashed lines with rounded edges etc. I would consider added a default canvas on top of the webgl canvas and do my drawing on that which would give me a lot more options.
- Different enemy types. Different enemy types with different behaviours would mean you would have to plan accordingly depending upon who you were up against.
Here’s a gif demo (5mb) :
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