Hi, my name is Tom and Free Qry (free the chickens) is my very first jam game.
When I started, I immediately decided to make a game where you need to free some chickens from captivity.
Since I wanted to work on some very basic enemy behavior, I decided to add guards.
For the player character, I decided on a fox. Don't worry, this isn't your typical fox.
First thing I worked on were sprites for the player character, enemy and chicken. I used Aseprite for this purpose and set the size of each sprite to be 16x16 pixels max. I thought it would be fun to work with some constraints.
Once I had the sprites, I opened up Unity and created a basic level and added player movement. I had no animations at this stage.
This article helped me a lot with getting the graphics right.
Next step was to implement basic AI for the enemy so that it would chase the player and also trigger a lose state.
The AI is just detecting the player using ray-casting and then initiating movement in the direction of the player. It's nothing fancy but it works. At this point, I had only idle animations for all characters and no walk animations.
After that, I added more animations and implemented possibility to actually free the chickens from the cages. I decided to make it a requirement for finishing a level.
This meant that I had my primary loop done and could move on to make more levels for the game.
To summarize, my goal for the jam was to do things I haven't done before like:
- Finishing a game and submitting it
- Creating a game with pixel graphics and various animations
- Having some basic enemy behavior
- Incorporating gamepad support
If I had more time I planned on:
- Adding more levels with new mechanics
- Adding more sprites and animations
What I learnt:
- Drawing in Aseprite
- Working with Unity animator
- Using new Unity input system
I am very happy about participating in this jam. The 2 week deadline meant that I could easily squeeze in an hour or two here and there and not stress over not having enough time to finish my small project.
Thanks for reading and good luck with your own endeavors :)