5 months ago, if you had asked me how to make Space Invaders in Unity, I would have probably asked you what Unity was. However, within 5 months, I did actually end up making Space Invaders, worked on a 3D endless runner with little success, went to my first Full Indie Summit (and got excited about turning 19 so I could finally attend the regular meet ups!) but most importantly, met a group of amazing like-minded people from AMS Game Development Association (AGDA).
I signed up for Global Game Jam with my friend from AGDA. We ended up bumping into one of our fellow club mates and another amazing artist to form a team. The day started out with the theme of the game jam being announced as “waves. Hence, we immediately got to work based on the idea of having waves of enemies attack a barista at Waves, our local coffee shop.
The game was a 2D top-down shooter game. Despite the simplistic idea, there were still lots to include. Everything from implementing coffee machine turrets, the health packs, the coins, to the character and enemies’ movements- our 48 hours were eaten up in a blink of an eye.
The best part was definitely how polished our final project turned out to be. Our artist was talent wrapped in a human body— we ended up with awesome graphics and the animations were spot on. I enjoyed being able to interact with the animations and audio options in Unity as I have been so used to keeping both of those to a minimal in my own little games.
We stayed for the final presentations and ended up with the opportunity to demo ours as well. It was a gratifying experience being able to support and be supported by fellow game developers.
All in all, Global Game Jam was nothing short of amazing and I'm glad I'm starting my year off right!
As always, catch you next time! :)
Check out our project submission here!
A temporarily hosted version of our game is here. (there are occasionally bugs in the WebGL version that don’t exist in our actual game, so apologies beforehand!) *Will update this link when we post the game somewhere cooler ;)
Watch our presentation here.
