Thinking more about how to unify my interests in programming and art, I’ve been turning to games again – it’s been a while! After spending nearly two months on a prototype platformer game, I had to realize
- 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 don’t have that much experience with game design, so ultimately it wouldn’t even have been all that interesting to play.
Inspired by a video on “a game a week”, I decided to abandon the big project and go for way 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 – with a beginning, middle, and end, revolving around a simple core game mechanic.
Despite its simplicity, there were quite a few interesting technical bits here to experiment with:
- importing the rigged player model from Blender into Unity
- an outline shader for the player
- some postprocess bloom in the background
- Cinemachine virtual camera controls
- a particle system for the exploding mushrooms
- 2d physics