My first project when I decided to get serious about games, in 2022. Not having much experience in game design and development, I spent around two months on a prototype platformer game in Unity, until I realized:

• It would take a lot longer to properly finish the game with nice artwork and really smooth gameplay.
• Even though developing the game was a lot of fun, I really didn’t have that much experience with game design, so ultimately it would likely not even be all that interesting to play.

Inspired by a video on “a game a week”, I decided to abandon the big project and go for smaller, focused mini games that could actually be implemented in a short time. This is the first of them – situated in what used to be just the intro of my original larger game.

My main goal here was to have a “complete” game – title, beginning, core game mechanic, ending. You guide Elsie, the household robot, out of the woods to a new home. Giant exploding mushrooms help in overcoming obstacles.

You can play this in any desktop web browser, by clicking on the image below:

Despite its simplicity (this is good for about 2-3 minutes of gameplay!), there were a few interesting technical bits here to experiment with:

• Elsie is built from just a few polygons in Blender, animated by an armature (bone structure).
• She is rendered into an offscreen texture, using an outline shader.
• I’ve used Cinemachine virtual camera controls.
• The exploding mushrooms employ a particle system.
• 2D physics are used for player movement.