BloomBlightBarren

Inspiration

Of course, we were inspired by the theme of this hackathon as a base. More specifically, though, we saw a post-apocalyptic (the ones associated with the barren) and asked ourselves "What if the theme of one hackathon tried to invade the other"?

For the gameplay, our largest source of inspiration was Hollow Knight. The idea of developing a platformer starring Lenny really excited us, and we thought the more open level layout and the combat would fit this idea the best.

What it does

Bloom Blight Barron is a 2D platformer PC video game starring Lenny, a dragon who explores the enchanted forest in search for his companion T.K. . He has a few movement options, including jumping, both single and double jumps, climbing, and gliding with his wings. But he may also encounter dangerous creatures from Blight and from the invasive Barron. We currently implemented two enemies types, the Shroom and the Fly. Lenny has two main ways of dealing damage, with claw attack, which do small damage but are very quick and flexible, or the fire breath, which is slow and inflexible but deals a lot of damage over a large area.

The general gameplay loop is going through large open levels, interacting with both the platforming sections and the combat sections, with some focusing solely on one of them while others being a hybrid of the two.

How we built it

This game was made in Unity and C#

Challenges we ran into

As a platformer, movement was one of the most elaborate elements of the game. Having to create new gameplay mechanics drew more complicated as more mechanics were added. For example, we want it so that while the player normally has 2 jumps, if they walk off a ledge that uses up one of their jumps. However, this brought many quirks throughout the whole projects, such as jumps being uncapped or gliding not functioning.

One of the other challenges we faced was figuring out how to work with Unity 2D. Specifically, the animations and sprite-work. While 2D animation overall seems simpler than 3D, the process to implement and learn this in such a short amount of time was quite detrimental to out vision for the full project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the accomplishments of this project that I am proud of is Working on the enemy animations along with the basic actions for Lenny. Instead of complicating his movements with animations, we decided to change the sprite whenever he performed any one specific action. I am proud of this as this was my first time working with animation in Unity 2D, and the final result is animations that make both Lenny and the enemies feel more alive.

We are proud of how movement for Lenny ended. While it still has its quirks, the fact we were able to work together to figure out a lot of the issues that the character had and make all the separate game components interact with each other is something I am really proud of.

What we learned

This was some of our first time making a 2D platformers in Unity, so this taught a lot on how characters may work, how to interact with the 2D physics, determining which settings worked best for it, and generally gain a better intuition on how to make video games.

What's next for BloomBlightBarren

Next, we hope to expand by creating more levels, gameplay ideas, and flesh out a more in depth story. For example with gameplay, we would want to add and improved gliding or flying mechanic, a more indepth combat system, with a variety of different attacks, unlockable skills an new more challenging enemies to face off against. Having our adorable mascot Lenny traveling through the corrupted Blights and Barrens is an idea that deserves more development and planning past Knighthacks.