31 January 2017

Hopper - a "finished" project

Many times I've been tempted to take part in a game jam, but up until now I always had something on my agenda that was in the way.

A friend of mine, set to defeat adulthood (and perhaps even puberty), pointed me in the direction of the "Finally Finish Something Jam". A jam that lasted a month where the goal was to finish a personal project that you had lying around. That's the ideal type of jam for me :)

I happened to be busy with a small test project, I was creating a small test bed where I could play with AI code in a puzzle game. So with a good time frame for a Jam (31 days) and a good project, I joined the jam.

In the upper right corner of this blog you have a link to the result. It's a first version. I'd like to add more and smarter AI models, the option to add you own levels and the option to add your own AI. I also would like to look into writing an API on Google cloud to register high scores, levels and AI's. But all these are quite out of scope for this jam.

How did I go along

For source control I used my own perforce server on Droplet and the game was developed with Unity Personal.

For the UI I used the free Jolly UI kit. I had enough with the free version, but in future versions I'll need the full kit.

It's hard to find nowadays, but I used the free Photoshop CS2 for all the textures. It does the job, but the current Photoshop version is quite a lot easier (and more expensive of course).

I tried adding sound effects, but let's face it, I'm not good at that, so the sound effects are out (they're in, but disabled).

I also need to work on the levels I think, I ordered them a bit by difficulty, but that can be tweaked. And I can definitely add more.

Anyway, give it a go, tell me what you liked, what you didn't like, was it too hard or way too easy? Do you understand how it works without much trouble? What do you think I should add?

And foremost: have fun!