Dogfight: Cataclysm

Inspiration

A Sequel to one of our lead team member and developer's previous games about a dog flying a spaceship and battling alien cats. We chose this sequel because it allowed us to create a triple entendre of a setting in space, using the space bar, and controlling the space between you and the boss.

What it does

It is a side-scroller-Esque arcade-like game that utilizes momentum and speed inspired by gamified space physics to create a fun, challenging, and unique experience for the player. (I swear this is not written by AI). We are excited to show you all that it does.

How we built it

As a team of 4, two of us our developers (one well-seasoned (Andrew) and the other, raw as a slice of chicken from Sam's (Brandon)), two artists and musicians (Andrew non-developer Andrew (called Moon)), and a general helper, play tester, and encourager (Sam). We all participated in workshopping ideas, Andrew focused on the physical art that was implemented into the game, the hierarchy and logical/modular structure of the game system, and most game dev tasks. Brandon focused on the math-heavy and movement-based problems. Moon composed 3 magnificent music tracks and digital art for the UI. Sam got us food and coffee and play tested. Love Sam.

Challenges we ran into

Non-technical: Time, bodies shutting down. Porcelain philosophizing about pain trade-offs, fading away, minute hysteria, headache, sleep deprivation, but dang did those music sessions go hard. Technical: We had some difficult technical implementations including a charge and dash mechanic and pushing forward based on velocity (it will make sense if/when you play it), scroller implementation, gamified gravitational orbital physics, procedural generation of asteroid clusters, enemies, planets, etc, and GitHub version control conflict resolution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are particularly pleased with the relative completeness of the project given that we designed all of the programs, compositions, art without the use of AI, to which was confined to debugging purposes. We especially want to DRAW attention to the hand drawn, real-life, physical paper art that is used in the video game. Additionally, the smoothness and excitement from successfully overcoming the difficult math-related challenges.

What we learned

Andrew learned that he could create digital twins of his crayon art. He also learned how to color inside the lines. Brandon, being new to unity and somewhat game dev, learned a lot about C#, unity's interface, object creation, git integration, etc. Sam and Moon were able to experience the lifecycle of a hackathon software project and play active roles in the non-technical/soft skill aspects. The most bitter lesson (not from coffee or Richard Sutton) was learning to cut down on scope creep.