Primordial

Inspiration

What makes earth unique to all other planets is our ability to sustain life. The smallest unit of life is the cell. This is why we chose to build our entire game around the cell, as it symbolizes hope and life within the vastness of space.

What it does

Primordial is a top-down action game where you pilot a probe into the hearts of stars to harvest organic elements. Navigate procedurally generated mazes inside each star, fight off solar enemies, and activate element nodes under pressure before the heat timer expires. Back on the ship, combine harvested elements , Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Sulfur , into the four components of a living cell: the membrane, cytoplasm, mitochondria, and nucleus. Complete the cell before the Biotic Meter hits 100% and humanity is lost forever.

How we built it

Primordial was built with a single coder and artist in Unity for almost 20 straight hours. The maze generation uses a recursive backtracker algorithm to procedurally generate a unique star interior every time. The synthesis system (crafting) is built on ScriptableObject recipes with a persistent static completion tracker that survives scene loads. There are 3 types of enemies who all pathfind using a custom BFS(Breach First Search) implementation that navigates the maze grid in real time, recalculating routes as the player moves.

Challenges we ran into

Doing any task for 20 hours straight is difficult and was by far the hardest to overcome. As our group only had 2 people and 1 coder, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to get a good looking game within 24 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we actually finished a working game. Many other hackathons we think too ambitiously and never really get a finished product. In the end, and small complete game is better than any unfinished game.

What we learned

Building a complete game loop in 24 hours forces ruthless prioritization. We had to nail a gameloop quickly and expand from it. Almost every step had to be calculated to see if it would actually fit within the time limit.

What's next for Primordial

Currently the goal is just to create a simple cell which represent life. Further stems could include actually building ecosystems with these elements and potentially a new earth as the old one becomes inhabitable and distant.

Built With

• c#
• unity