OVERVIEW
HOWDEE'S TINY SPACE EXPERIENCE was my first collaborative game project at FutureGames. It is inspired by the 1979 arcade game "Lunar Lander". The whole game was produced in 8 work days from concept to finished product.
Engine: Unity
Team size: 9
Time in development: 8 days
Genre: Arcade
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
The core gameplay loop revolves around navigating an asteroid belt, and to mine crystal from asteroids without getting hurt. For this project I implemented a system for spawning asteroids across the map.
When I programmed the asteroids, the main challenge was making the asteroid belt into an interesting, dynamic environment. In order to achieve this, generation of the asteroids is highly randomized; Asteroids generate at different masses, with different amounts of crystals attached, as well as random velocity and torque. I also employed measures to keep the asteroids spread out, bouncing around the map.
The “Asteroid Thrower” (pictured above) is used to set out spawn points for asteroids, which thrown from the edges of the map towards the middle. The spawn points are visualized in the editor as yellow balls – the number of spawn points can be adjusted in the UI. The same component is also used to specify how often another asteroid should be thrown into the level, and at what speed, etc.
CODE SAMPLES
Because a large amount of asteroids sometimes get spawned into the level at once, I optimized the game a bit by adding an 'object pool manager'. This object creates and manages pools for all different types of game objects; Asteroids, sounds etc.
CODE SAMPLES
ASTEROID SYSTEM
OPTIMIZATION
For this project I also did the audio programming. I decided to make a sound manager and a music player from scratch, since we only needed some basic functionality like playing looping sounds, and changing background music at different stages of the game.