Ready. Set. Horse!
Ready. Set. Horse! was developed in 48 hours for the Global Game Jam 2024. The theme was "Make Me Laugh".
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We had a team of 4 people: a 2D artist and an UI artist, a Developer and I worked as both a Game Designer and a Developer.
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The game is a mini-game frenzy (4 mini-games in total), where the aim is to get a high score before losing 3 lives.
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The mini-games are:
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Pop the Piñatas
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Dodge the Nails
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Hat-mania
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Make Him Happy
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My Contributions
UI Integration
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Most of the gameplay is done through UI objects. As I was the most experienced with the Unity Engine, I was responsible for integrating a lot of the back-end code to the UI display. For this I used:
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Unity's Pointer Handler to manage player input
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Heavy use of prefab objects to Instantiate game elements
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​Integrating functions so the other programmer doesn't have to interact with the UI
Nails Pathing
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In the mini-game Dodge the Nails, the player has to avoid flying nails to not pop the balloon.
The nails can spawn from any direction, having their spawn area everywhere that is just outside de bounds of the screen, they then determine the position of the balloon by getting the mouse position and applying a force towards them.
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Pros:
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Computationally cheap
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Scalable and easy to iterate​
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Cons:
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Doesn't support different movement types except a straight line
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Could have problems on different resolutions
Wearing Hats
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In the mini-game Hat-mania, the player has to put hats on the characters of the corresponding color.
Both the hats and the characters spawn at random locations within the bounds of the screen and the spawn amount is random given a specific range. The hats are moved using the OnPointerClick and the OnPointerDrag functions. When the player lets go of it the OnPointerUp function fires, and determines if the hat was dropped on the head of the correct character
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Pros:
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Scalable in terms of characters, hats colors and levels
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Easy to iterate and balance
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Cons:
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Characters can spawn overlapped making it very difficult for the correct trigger to work
- Characters and hats can spawn very far away making the level extremely difficult to complete
The Event
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At the end of the 48 hours we were quite proud of the end result, since managed to do everything we had in our scope
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I was especially proud since we had people with completely different levels of game development experience, as I believe that as the team coordinator I was able to harness what everyone was good at.
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Won first place at the event in Leiria, which had the highest number of participants in the whole country
