Whirlwind Smasher

An exciting 2D side-scrolling game where you play as Grog, an angry, and I mean very angry, creature that is out to smash and whirl into anything in his path.

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Whirlwind Smasher

Inspiration

We created the idea for Whirlwind Smasher from our need of wanting a fast-paced exciting game where you can smash your way through the enemy while also conserving your energy in a balancing act. From that idea came a whole document of different ideas and features we could create and add to the game to make it something we would want to play and be proud of. Whirlwind Smasher is exactly this.

What it does

Whirlwind Smasher is a 2D side scrolling game that lets the player play almost infinitely if they have the skill to do so. The player can click and drag or swipe if on mobile to throw their character Grog into the flurry with his fist ready to break anything that stands in his way. Enemies, barrels, walls are all nothing to Grog's fist! When he defeats an enemy or barrel using his whirlwind fist he gains an energy boost getting ready to fly further and defeat more foes.

Careful though, if Grog is not in his whirlwind state when hitting an enemy or obstacle in his way then Grog will take a massive penalty to his energy from his injuries and no longer have the drive to move any more!

While in the whirlwind state Grog can smash through just about anything but he uses his limited supply of energy to wind up his fist. The player must balance how much energy they use to the distance they travel in order to achieve the highest score and win!

How we built it

We build Whirlwind Smasher in the Unity2D engine based in C#. We chose this engine based on familiarity, power and ease of use in order to create the best game we could dream of within the time frame.

Within the Unity Engine we created each Script and process along with all of the assets (besides folley) in order to create the game we were already playing in our minds when we had thought of the idea. Each interaction and behaviour was modeled to the smooth and interactive gameplay you can see along with completely custom particle effects for the blood and completely custom graphics for Grog, the enemies and the whole stage.

Challenges we ran into

Besides managing the creeping threat of a goodnight's sleep. We found our major challenges in figuring out which ideas we could reasonably implement within the given time frame. As every behaviour and interaction needs to be mapped out we settled on creating the gameplay first and adding unique ideas at the ends stages to create as complete of a product game as possible. Initially we had a whole document of ideas that needed to be narrowed down to the bare essentials and the sad part is seeing some of the exciting but not as important features take the back of the list.

Our second major challenge we ran into was the terrible coexistence of Unity and Github. Sworn enemies they tried their very best to make every interaction terrible for us. We had one hiccup with a corrupt branch and a few more with small features on different branches but ultimately we found success in the end.

The last major challenge as mentioned earlier was sleep, it has to happen apparently! We tried our best to keep to a shortened version of our normal sleep schedules because of midterms and university but we persevered, doing as much as we could while still awake and ultimately, succeeding!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of the fluidity of our game. We found the animations, behavioural scripts and effects we made were all of top notch quality and all work together to make a game that feels completely fluid in the hands of the user. For a 24 hour straight grind, this is some of our finest work we can all be proud of.

Another accomplishment we can be proud of is the amount of teamwork and best practices we implemented throughout our game. We found code reviews, having a dev branch with our most stable build and creating readable, clean code gave us multitudes of success throughout our project. Coding practices are strongly supported for a reason and we could see it while creating this game.

What we learned

For a grand majority of our team, Unity is not a platform we were entirely familiar with before this project. Experience with the platform ranged from expert to beginner in which it was a learning experience for us all. We found teaching each other things created a lot of healthy, strong team communication and learned a lot about the platform and engine itself.

Game Design is another key thing we learned in this project. Some things just look right in games and its hard to say why, the answer to that why is good game design. It needs to be intuitive, fluid and make the user feel like the actions they are submitting are going through.

What's next for Whirlwind Smasher

Our idea document could make this section full! So we will give a brief summary of some of our future plans for the Whirlwind Smasher game.

Powerups We think implementing a range of powerups would give the game that much more of a oompf in order to give the player some options and make them feel much more powerful and hopefully last longer. Some idea we had were:

  • Stale Bread, Slight increase in energy
  • Ale, Enemies touched while not in an attack state don’t slow you down
  • Medieval Running Shoes, A short distance away before you hit an enemy you dash towards them and gain momentum after attack
  • Brass Knuckles, increases blood splatters and damage
  • Fresh Bread, Full energy restored

Obstacles More obstacles would create a better reason for the player to whirl upwards and burn energy for no reason. This would create a higher difficulty on the game as you wouldn't want to get stuck. Some ideas we had were:

  • Magical wall, Grog cannot smash through them
  • Hanging Enemies, creates a way for Grog to not want to go upwards

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