Concoct an Escape

Inspiration

We were really inspired by the fluid particle systems in 'Noita', and thought it would be interesting to see a more slow paced puzzle game focussing on a side-on pixel grid.

What it does

You can play through a series of puzzles, learning about the properties of each unique type of potion in order to escape captivity and save your wife!

How we built it

The game was built in Unity, using C# scripts and Git to help with remote collaboration on the project. We communicated over discord to get assets and ideas wired into the game as quickly as possible, and worked together to stomp out bugs (of which there were many)...

Challenges we ran into

Some members of the project were learning Unity for the first time. Due to the complexity of maintaining a 1920x1080 grid of pixels, much of the code had to be written using Unity Burst and Jobs so that it could be threaded for efficiency. This added a whole new layer of complexity that made debugging very frustrating at times, but we prevailed!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think the game has very good visual polish. The fluid system turned out very well, and performant too, especially considering it was programmed from scratch with no prior fluid simulation nor grid tile experience. Collision with the tiles is 100% bespoke, as the Unity default collision system would have involved way too much overhead. The tiles are all rendered by a custom shader written in CG, a Unity shader language based on HLSL.

What we learned

Some members who were inexperienced with unity gained a lot of experience. For many of us this was also the first time we had done an interdisciplinary project (coding + art). We have also deepend our knowledge about threads, performant code, and shaders.

What's next for Concoct an Escape

We would love to continue this project after the game jam. There are so many more puzzles that could be made to fully explore the system we have created. It would also be fun to make a Level design section that was easy for players to use so that they could create challenges for themselves or their friends.