The lecturers of the course I am part of decided to make an event that would involve students from every. That is how the TakeOver GameJam was created.
The theme for this game jam was “Environmentalism” and I was part of a team of 4 people and was responsible for the animal movement, scoring, difficulty, UI, menu programming and a video that had to accompany the game. We decided to use the Unity game engine since we were most familiar with it.
Since this was a 5-day long game jam, it was pretty calm, though we learned about the theme only on the second day. The first day was spent doing team-building activities.
As a team, we spent quite a bit of time brainstorming the ideas of games we could do. We settled on an idea that seemed easiest to implement and create a minimal viable product for, after all, we had limited time.
I was proud of implementing object pooling for all of the animals, that were teleported away upon impact and then “respawned” after a bit. The difficulty was handled like this: the player needs to reach a certain amount of score points to progress, when they do, the system adds more animals into the object pool. This continues until the last level is reached or the player loses.
The biggest challenge was building the game. Since the design for the game was perfect for a casual mobile game, we needed to make the final game to be like a mobile screen. And we struggled to set this up within Unity. As we were doing this on the final day, we had to rush it and were only able to reach the desired screen size by hardcoding in the screen size in the project settings.
Martynas Antipenkovas 