Charged

Made with	Unity
Timeline	1 week + post-release improvements
Playable	Itch.io

Retrospective

Made for Weekly Game Jam 205.

The Idea

The jam theme was “unconventional superpowers”.

It's a platformer with a light amount of physics-based challenge. Your unconventional superpower is that you are statically charged. As such, you can either attract or repel crates. It's in the repelling of crates that you can make projectiles of them. This allows you to progress through levels and defeat exit-blocking enemies. You can also move crates for leverage to higher places etc.

What went well

I learned a ton this week too. Particularly I've gotten a good handle on Unity's animation system now.

The object attraction and repelling physics are far from perfect. They're good enough for a first attempt at anything like this though. If I get the opportunity to, then this game is for-sure a candidate for later expansion.

What went wrong

What didn't go wrong this week? It started with a bad design idea which I mused on for several days. I abandoned it Monday morning and later began work on Charged the same day. I thus lost several days effort.

I also felt like I spent too much time in the “sandbox phase”. It's a scene which contains one or two of every prefab and their intended behaviours. I spent 80%-90% percent of the time there and the remaining 10% on actual level design. Everything seemed to fall into place once the prefabs were working as intended in the sandbox.

Unfortunately I ended up submitting this game late. Still a game made within a week, but short of the jam deadline.

What I learned

• Don't sit on an idea for too long. Gotta fail fast!
• Sometimes, a feature will not work in the browser export. In a jam situation especially, don’t dwell on it.