The Long Winter

Overview

This was a Ludum Dare 51 game jam project which I worked on for 3 days in October 2022 in a team of 6, where 3 of us did programming, 2 of us did art and one of us did music and sound effects.

The theme of this game jam was "Every 10 seconds" so we decided to create a survival game where the player is stranded in a cold environment following a plane crash and has to manage their heat and hunger as they explore their environment as they will lose 1 point in each stat every ten seconds unless they do something to overcome this challenge. 

Event System

My role in this game jam most revolved around creating the event system which would be used to tell the story. This system is triggered whenever the player interacts with a tile that has a green question mark over it. The system is built using a sequence of scriptable objects which are chained together to form a sequence of events. Each scriptable object supports an image in the left panel and a text area on the right panel. The right panel can have simple text added to it going from the top down, as well as buttons for different options in a menu coming up from the bottom up. This allows both descriptive parts of a story as well as choices for the player to be presented. Each scriptable object also supports giving the player items and playing sounds making the system flexible and easy to use for my other teammates as they created some of the events that went into the final game. 

Items

I also worked on the creation and implementation of items in this game. I used scriptable objects again for each item, assigning a sprite and a set of attributes to each one. I then added the code to give items an effect. The items in the game broadly fit into 3 categories: Clothes, Weapons and Consumables. Clothes provide heat, helping the player to overcome the loss of 1 heat every ten seconds, weapons provide a way to kill animals and hostile creatures and consumables either provide the player with hunger, helping them to overcome the loss of 1 hunger every ten seconds or they provide health, allowing the player to regain lost health from fights with hostile creatures.