Evitable Boredom: Apus: Global Game Jam 2018

Over the course of 48 hours, I worked on a team to create a digital game [Apus] for Micro Soft Windows. The game was created in the Unity software. There were three artists on the team: Jzak, lmsnow, and me. I also did sound for the game. Our coder was marchov, who had experience in C++ but not Unity. Erica Roy was an initial team member and contributed to the game idea, but was ill and had to leave the event.

Here are more specifics on the art. Jzak made icons, found the sun image, and space background. lmsnow made two asteroids, two planets, and the title screen. I made the initial form of the figure of Apus (our title screen character), two planets, two asteroids, the browser icon, and the win screen.

Left: lmsnow's title screen. Right: The initial character I made.

Our most difficult thing to figure out was how to incorporate sound into the Unity engine, and tie it to a system of triggers. The music could easily be made by placing a single Audio Source gameobject in Unity, and attaching an audio clip to it. We had to type in the code itself to allow an array of audio clips to be attached to the Audio Source.

Beyond placing the title screen audio, most of my sound work involved watching videos of coding sound in Unity and combing through free audio clips online. Originally I had played on my Viola and made random sounds in the event space for the game. Eventually though I wasn't sleep deprived and thought to look for free audio clips online. From personal experience, I suggest using FreeSound.org.

How to Play screen

The game itself is simple, when planets charge up, send asteroids from them to another planet in need of that element. For instance, a planet that is too cold needs fire. There are also randomized events, such as a plague occurring on a life planet. We tested the game by playing it with various difficulties by changing the speed planets charged and the speed War and Plague events happened.