Unplanet is our contribution to the Hagenberg Game Jam 2020. It is a vivid interpretation of the German kids’ game “Topfschlagen”.
- Duration: 48 hours
- Topic: Hindsight Is Always 2020
- Date: 18th - 20th Dec 2020
- Collaborators: Marlene Mayr, Matthias Patscheider, Eric Thalhammer
- Software: Unity, Unity’s SRP
- My Task Areas: UI, State Machine, Shaders and Effects
Implementation
Hints depend on the player’s distance to the goal. They can be seen as the environment changes, and heard through a dynamic sound scape (made by my team mate Eric). In the more advanced levels, as screen shaders get more intense, you will also notice that the shader calms down the closer the player gets to the illuminated cube.
Perks
- A humble custom state machine handles the levels and positions the goals.
- Serialization allowed us to save the goal positions in level bundles. This could be extended further if we ever continued the project with a better game design.
Rendering
This was the first time I did not just use Unity’s new render pipelines, but also had a look at the buffers. I analyzed the new possibilities and passes for about a day - half of the game jam duration. I ended up using custom passes for the fullscreen shader effects which I achieved with a mix of Unity’s shader graph and HLSL. The player’s distance to the goal is used to pick a color from a gradient, which in turn colors most of the environment “cold” or “warm” based on height. This results in the warm tones coming from the floor while cool colors appear to descend from the sky. These two words are the hints, which players are told by their peers in the analog game.
These are some of the notes I took to get an overview:
The geometry was provided by my team mate Matthias and integrated well with the shaders. There are different shaders for each run of the game, they share similar aesthetics but differ in their patterns and implementation.
I also worked on the game’s UI, created the sprites necessary and integrated them into the state machine I had programmed for the game jam.
Downloads
So you somehow landed on this unearthly planet. It’s weird, but you feel like you should definitely venture out to find secret objects hidden in the scene. That turns out to be a challenge, given that your vision becomes super trippy every time you find one.
But don’t worry, the strange planet you are on is not hostile; it actually helps you: the colors of the environment become warmer the closer you get to your goal and colder the further you get away from it.