Jamming Out
2025-02-26
The last two weeks, I have been making a game with a friend for the Pirate Game Jam 16. I haven’t made a game for a jam or otherwise in about 4 years, but I thought it would be fun especially having someone to keep up with about a project. So, we eagerly awaited the start of the jam to hear what the theme would be.
The theme is “You are the weapon.” We toss some cursory ideas around at night and go to bed thinking maybe Duck Hunt but you are somehow the duck getting revenge on the hunters. Already kind of a silly premise, but after finding the inspirational model of a very buff goose by JackTheTinkerer, our premise was set. You would pilot a goose with buff human arms into 3rd person beat ’em up action.
At this point, I was already pretty much sold on going back to Playcanvas to make a 3D game. The game jam required the game to be uploaded to itch.io as a web playable game. So doing a web platform where I already had some experience seemed like the move to make. It turned out to be a good choice for my partner Daniel also, because using the web interface didn’t require installing any additional software, and it was intuitive enough to be productive without much frontloading.
So, after handing out a few links to some creative commons assets, and a crash course on using Blender to prep assets, I set Daniel to design the level, while I tackled the changes to the main character goose model. Decimating it to reduce the polygon count and give a good low poly vibe, then fixing a few spots where the geometry was broken or disjointed. That became the base, and doing the UV projection and texture painting, which felt like a good refresher. But then, I started a totally new skill out of necessity. Since the main character is a goose, there wasn’t a good option to auto rig or animate him, (Tobias is what we ended up naming him) I had to try my hand and make several animations for the various interactions in the game. This was in a big part possible thanks to Imphenzia. I highly recommend anyone learning blender or game design visit his youtube channel.
After working through some initial physics issues and bringing in our character, I started with the 3rd person movement tutorial for Playcanvas, but it was clear a lot of things needed modified. One challenge that once learned, became the base for other mechanics was determining if Tobias could jump. The method is to create a collision entity below the character, and raycast to that collision entity and if anything other than the character or the entity are returned, the character can jump. I feel like I spent five days fine tuning the physics of movement, but a lot of feedback suggests that I still didn’t get it right and Tobias needs more airbore momentum. Either way, that didn’t leave much time for the rest of everything, and working with the enemies became my next goal.
The enemy behavior, especially with animations, was a mental model that was initially hard to wrap my head around, but I just took it one feature at a time. The way Playcanvas handles animations now is with an animation state graph. which is a visual representation of switching animation states and how long the switch takes etc. To trigger these changes you need to set up values that can be changed in the code only with helper functions. Using the jump raycast method from before, I set up a forward entity in front of the enemy that checked if there was an obstacle in the way and if so to randomly turn negative or positive 90 degrees. Then an array of forward entities in a wide triangular spread acted as the enemy’s “sight” if they were threatened. Which then I figured I could copy and fiddle with to be the range for Tobias’s honk effect. I animated a nice honk and I thought it would be novel if it had a chance to cause fear and turn the enemies away. That seemed a little too powerful so I managed to whip up some UI to show a basic cooldown effect. Meanwhile Daniel was making the theme music, doing some still shot renders for the story beat, and sourcing sound effects for the action. Crunching all of this and some last minute voice work, the title screen, credits, UI, “how to play”, it was a dash to turn in a playable level.
This became an obsession for two weeks, and most of my time away from work was spent developing this game. And I had fun, and learned some novel skills, not only that, but I did it with a friend. I’ll leave the link to the game on itch below, make sure you play on a PC or with mouse and keyboard.
https://murraybot.itch.io/goose-on-the-loose
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