Snowdown
About
Penguins, snowball cannons and a massive ego. This is an arcade game where penguins defeat each other with big fancy cannons in a competitive showdown
A penguin with a snow cannon represents the player inside the game world. Each player starts with a certain amount of ammunition in their cannon and starts shooting at each other while dodging the other players’ shots. When a player presses the shoot button on the cannon input, a snowball is also fired in the game. To aim where you shoot the snowball, the player must rotate their physical cannon. The ammunition can be reloaded by putting “snowballs” through a tube. When a player runs out of ammunition, they then make the decision to either run to the “snowball” basket for more ammunition and risk getting hit by the enemy or wait until the enemy is out of ammunition themselves and then run to reload.
The game also adds an extra challenge by randomly spawning covers. The first player to deplete the others health points wins. Some of the more interesting tools we have used include lasers and sensors in order to make the in-game reloading by putting the balls through the tube.
Project Info
- Role: Gameplay Designer/2D Artist
- Team Size: 6
- Time frame: 2 Months
- Engine: Unity Engine
Introduction
Snowdown was a 6-month project related to a course at Uppsala University where we had to build an arcade game using an alternative control system. That means no controllers or a mouse and keyboard. We had to make a physical machine to display at an event known as the Gotland Game Conference which happens every year. We had some setbacks at the beginning that we faced with the team composition unbalanced.
When I was working on Snowdown I was working mostly on movement since it is a core mechanic of the game. had to work in it for most of the time until we in the team thought it was good after a lot of internal and external testing. Also designed the stalling timer and to counteract players stalling the game until the time runs out.also made promotional art of the game for Gotland Game Conference. Also helped build the machine with electrical wiring and working the canon.
Movement
I worked heavily on the movement of the game and worked on making the movement work in the game together with the programmer. I was responsible for building the canon controls for the game and we had two iterations of the canon movement. the first iteration of the movement was that there was with trackball from a mouse were you would move a stick and the player would follow but this would prove to be too difficult to get in to the game since we had to constantly fine tune and fix the bugs that came with it and every change that was made to the movement. So we decided to switch to a joystick-based movement since it would be more reliable. also conducted external and internal playtesting of the movement and fine tuned the movement to where it is now.
Stalling Timer
The Stalling timer is when the player is not interacting and stalling a timer will start appearing as a bar that depletes and when it depletes you lose a one snowball in the game. This was implemented to prevent stalling since it became a big issue during beta testing since players decided to stall in order to force a draw where no one wins. You can still play defensively but you can not stall until the timer runs and it forces an interaction.
What I Learned
What I learned during this project was that despite the initial setbacks we faced we managed to create a game that beat all the odds. Communication is key in the project and we had a clear vision of how the game was going to be from the beginning to end. I learned that certain mechanics allowed for a playstyle that was unhealthy to the game and made a mechanic to counteract the playstyle. That movement can make a big difference for a Player vs Player. since having movement that is sluggish is not great for that kind game and that it also needs to be reliable.
2D Promotional Art
Worked on promotional art for the game and made business cards, arcade banners and posters. They were needed for the Gotland game conference 2019. They were coherent and in-line with the game’s art direction. But i accidently forgot to set the correct ppi on the poster which made it look a bit pixly.