Zee and the Quest for the Red Gems
Client: Myself - This is a personal project.
Year: 2020-2021
Responsibilities: Me! I produced everything except the music.
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The Challenge: I have been furlough during the pandemic in 2020, and I have three months to produce a game.
This game needs to be a 2.5d platformer game with a mascot, but needs to feel different compared to all of the other 2.5d platformers out there - there are loads. Also you are a team of 1 person, so you need to find a way of making this game aesthetically pleasing without spending way too much time on assets and texturing.
The Solution: The solution to this problem was creating a system in Unity where I could move a character along a path rather than a 2d plane. Lots of 2.5d platformers are restricted to a 2d plane, so differentiating the game from that would make it stand out.
The assets would be produced in a low poly style, using a texture atlas to give everything a very block colour look. I aimed to have something that looked like a Nintendo 64/ Sony PS1 game, and improve the look through post processing with depth of field and ambient occlusion.
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The Process: The most complicated part of the project was setting up the code for the object to follow the mouse and calculate the angle which Zee should follow as well as applying gravity in that direction just for the object. However once this had been overcome, the rest of the project was reasonably easy to produce.
The Results: The result of this project is that I finished it! It took longer than the 3 months to produce it, it was more like a year and a half. But the game is live on itch.io here:
https://jontirudd.itch.io/zee-and-the-quest-for-the-red-gems
