Last weekend, I spent some time working on an entry for Ludum Dare 36, an online game-jam where participants try to conceive, design, and build a game in 48 (or sometimes 72) hours! It was my first real game jam, and it ended up going pretty smoothly!

I wanted to try out some of the new features in the alpha of the upcoming version (5.5) of the Unity game engine, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to give it a shot! I also wanted to toy around with some of the ideas and mechanics we (myself, and a group of other, very talented students) used in our school project HyperMass a few years back to see if I could work out any of the issues we were having at the time.

Without further ado, I present “Civil Service”!

One of the things I was most excited about experimenting with was the 2D Tilemap system in Unity 5.5. Unity has always been at its core a 3D engine. Dedicated 2D features were only introduced in version 4.3… 8 years after the engine’s initial release. Quietly missing from the suite of 2D features was a “tile map” editor… a way to easily build a level from small repeated “chunks”. Version 5.5 adds this much desired feature, along with others I hadn’t even conceived of, such as “Smart Sprites”, “9 Slice Sprites”, and more!

The tile editor was exceptionally easy to use, although I encountered a number of issues with corrupted projects, and flakey features (though to be fair, I was using the alpha version of most of the tools). I found (an hour before the deadline) that release builds of tilemaps don’t have proper collision geometry defined, and characters and objects will fall right through… Luckily, my map was small and static, and I was able to throw a few large invisible boxes into the world so the player couldn’t fall through the ground!

One of the other areas I wanted to experiment in was 2D physics. Keeping the physics simulation stable was a significant issue in HyperMass, and I wanted to see if removing the third dimension could improve on it. Unity uses Box2D under the hood for 2D physics, as opposed to PhysX for normal 3D, and simplifying the gameplay would theoretically simplify the problem. It actually had a considerable impact, although some of the issues we were facing with HyperMass (particularly the simulation of a rope) were still present. I now have my own theories on how to fix it, but that’s for another post 😉

The actual Ludum Dare jam was quite a lot of fun! I was initially hesitant to join, but really enjoyed the exercise. The deadline ended up being quite tight, and I struggled to get things submitted on time, but I’m quite comfortable with how things turned out!