Kurt's Night Shift

The Game Assembly Discord announced a 48-hour game jam hosted by Climax Studio. At that time, my understanding of a 'game jam' was limited to the basic concept of game creation. Eager to participate, I joined forces with fellow students to form a team called Tiny Green Ants and we registered for the Climax Game Jam. This was my first game jam experience and it turned out to be incredibly enjoyable! It was so engaging that I found myself on the brink of addiction, barely sleeping throughout those 48 hours. Despite the exhilaration, I've decided that in future game jams, I will make sure to get proper rest. I am proud to have secured 3rd place in this friendly game jam, a remarkable achievement and learning experiences.

 
 
 
Character movements

I aimed for the character to rotate along the y-axis withing a 0 to 180-degree range, based on the mouse's position on the x-axis. Due to the time constraints preventing further investigation into the spin-walking issue, I opted to calculate the distance between the mouse position and the character, introducing a minimum threshold for how close the mouse can be to the character. If the distance falls below this threshold, the character won't rotate. The downside of this method is that it causes the character to snap quickly in certain mouse positions. However, this was deemed bearable compared to the constant spin-walking players would experience, as revealed through a quick playtest by my teammates.

Dialogue System

Among other features, I implemented were the 3D sprite pop-up utilizing 3D planes with applied textures that include transparency. Additionally, I incorporated dialogue text system which also triggers voice lines recorded by our game artist.

Among other tasks I contributed to during this game jam, setting up a Discord server, managing the Perforce mainline and Unity project, and creating tutorial videos to assist my teammates in setting up their workspaces were some of the activities.

You can play Kurt's Night Shift here at https://despacitos.itch.io/kurts-night-shift