Pitch: "Unlock the power of an enchanted pickaxe, use it to climb, teleport and fight through a treacherous cave in an attemp to get back out"
Development time: 12 weeks, 50% (240h/person)
Made with: TGE
Team size: 13
For this game we decided to make it fully 2D instead of 2.5D which meant we needed another way to play animations. Spritesheets seemed like the easiest solution.
I created a system that could take in a sprite sheet with cells of animation frames. The animation player would then take a small part of the sprite sheet and render it on a sprite one at a time to simulate an animation.
We also needed to load these animations somehow with customizable settings so everything looked like it should in game. I created both a json library and sprite sheet loader to help with this.
The sprite sheet loader read from a json file with animation data like what sprite sheet to use, FPS, cell size, looping, dead frames and if it should trigger a follow up animation(for transitions). This game controll to the animators and made the programmers job easier by not having to hard code every animation in the game.
Our artists wanted a way to be able to look at a sprite they made and see how it would look in the custom engine rather than in Unity. This led me to create a model/level viewer where they could use a json file to specify what sprite they wanted to test, its position, scale and if they wanted to load in a level to see how it would look together etc. The animators wanted the same thing so I made another tool for them to check out their animations.
The miner had a companion called Skully that helps the player navigate the game and help set the setting. This meant we need a dialogue system for him to communicate through.
I focused a lot on making the dialogue window scale properly to fit the text and to change how long it would stay up based on the amount of characters.
Like the sprite sheet loader the dialogue system also loaded everything it needed from a json file that our level designers could fill and add triggers for.
Besides skully, we added some lore bits just lying around for the interested players to find. This system is very similar to the dialogue system which made it quick and easy to create.
Programming:
- Jonathan Andersson
- Simon Nilsson
- Dino Zvonar
-Nils Hansson
- Omar Abdallah
Level Design:
- Jeff Persson
- Urban Gustavsson
- Anton Weibull
Animation:
- Sofie Nilsson
- Mischa Fridman
Graphics:
- Frida Backman
- Lukas Frej
- Nelly Lindbom
Disclaimer: I am part of The Game Assembly’s internship program. As per the agreement between the Games Industry and The Game Assembly, neither student nor company may be in contact with one another regarding internships before April 23rd.