Bubbles On Parade!
This game was made for the Finnish Game Jam (FGJ) and Global Game Jam (GGJ) 2024.
Video and audio produced by: Sound Spallation (Video has music)
Basic information
This game was made with a 6 person team; 2x Programmers, 1x Musician, 2x Artist and 1x Multirole.
The project took 48 hours to make and it was made with Unity.
Bubbles On Parade! is a basic tower defense game with a classic wave based combat system.
Creators
Core system designer, Programming
2D-art and Programming
Core system designer, Programming
Music
2D-art and Programming
2D-art and Programming
My contribution
I was a programmer and my main task was to make the base mechanics for our tower defense game.
Added features:
- Enemy pathfinding
- Different enemies and spawning
- Working turrets
- Economy system
- Health system
This was the second game I have ever made, so most of my time was spent figuring Unity out and watching tutorials. I mainly followed a tutorial series by Muddy Wolf.
Challenges:
Syntax and learning curve:
Working with C# and Object Oriented Programming was very different from the basic C++ course we just finished at school.
Applying what I was learning in the tutorials wasn't easy and trying to learn at the same time proved to be very difficult.
Economy and enemy balance:
Once the core mechanics were made no more programming had to be done. So I gave QA and balancing a try during the final phases of the game jam. I watched some videos about
game balance and tried to copy already successful games such as Balloons TD. I couldn't find a right balance of difficulty and reward especially during the very start of a round.
The game was either almost impossible to beat or beatable with only a few turrets. Turret strength was something I did not
put enough thought into while programming. The turrets were very similar to each other and impractical.
Working online:
It was my first time working fully online with my team members which put a bigger emphasis on communication. I think that we did
well in this category but it was certainly different then what we were used to. Especially the communication between all the programmers proved
to be harder. Not only helping each other but trying to explain your own ideas and thinking to another person became much harder and inefficient.
What I learned?
Programming:
Like I stated earlier my workhours were mostly spent building the very basic systems for our game. I believe that during this process I was developing a programmers way of thinking. The tutorials were well structured easy to follow and I was surprised by how little code the features required. I was still stumped with the OOP parts of the programme, but I started understanding what each part was meant to do.
Teamwork:
The online environment forced us to be more precise with our communication. For example, during the planning phase I got an idea for our duck turrets to shoot the bubbles with water. Our artist made a waterstream and showed it to me. I was thinking of a water 'shot' and at this point I realized that I didn't convey my idea to my teammate adequately, so they had to do some extra work.