General

Creating the game was a great learning experience for me. I was laughing when I first saw the running animation of Mr Tuba and when I recorded the sound effects.

Almost everything was done with Playmaker actions. But I utilized the Standard Assets' Third person controller and made small change to get me fast and dirty hack to prevent movement when I wanted. Then I used that with Playmaker action.

When I started to create the game and thinking about the themes given I chose it to have some "end of days"-feeling; nuclear war and zombies. But then it took some time to decide what kind of game I should do.

First I was thinking to make a shooting game, but currently I'm having an top-down shooter already in-progress with Unity (hopefully releasing it to Google Play + App Store before summer). So didn't want to do game from that genre. Then I got the idea to make a "runner game".

I imagined quite big level with lots of things to do, different enemies that are harder and machines to prevent the player from getting to the destination. But there was not enough time to do all that I wanted.

There was 72 hours to do the game.

First day

After I got home from my day job and I had eaten, it was time to get hands dirty with the jam.. not literally.

On the first day I did a simple level and created models for player, zombie and Mr Tuba. After level was created I baked the Navigation mesh as I was going to use it for restricting the areas for movement.
I started to do logic for the first mob. I haven't used Playmaker much and was not remembering how everything worked. I tried to make my zombie to follow player but it was not working very nicely.
It was time to get sleep.

Second day

When I was eating breakfast and googling around if there is some tips how to make my zombie to have "brains". Hopefully I found a great tutorial from Youtube (link) and created the mob with the help of that. It was having line of sight, field of view and range to find the player. It was wise.

Too wise, to be just a zombie. So I did make a dumber version of it with just range. Was better for the game as it made it easier to debug and not to have heavy logic.

Then was time to get the player movement working. First I was trying to get it moving with Playmaker actions but it was not working as I wanted and community member on the Slack channel suggested to use Standard Assets' third person controller. So I did.

I got my character moving and the zombie started to follow when I got to range. Great.

It was following and was annoying, but it did nothing to player. So next I made the zombie to attack the player and decrease player's health from every hit. Player's health can be seen from the floating blocks over his head.

We need some UI!

Then I wanted to do some UI for change and created the "Main menu" which is seen when the game is started. I did use own camera for it and then changing back to "Main camera" when game started.

Now was time for Mr Tuba to have logic. He basically just needed to run and get to the destination. I added the same kind of healthcontroller for him too. It was easy to set target for the navigation agent that I was using.

I wanted player to see how to control the game, so I created a screen where player quickly sees what he/she has to do and how. Also added "zoom camera" to see the Mr Tuba, idling around.

And at this point, all the models were moving in T-pose. So, next was to have the some animations. I created skeleton in Blender for my models that I created with MagicaVoxel. After I created the skeleton I uploaded it to Mixamo to get them animated. That was also a nice suggestion from the community's Slack channel. There were some challenges to get them working, but after all it was good enough for jam game.

At the end of the day, player gained the ability to attack! And for his misfortune, also how to die when health is gone. But at the moment, he was only dying in his soul. It did not prevent movement or anything. Just no health!

Third day

Now it was time to zombie to have animations. And player to actually die. Created UI to show failure menu, so player knows when he/she loses and could then try again.

Mr Tuba was unbeatable. He ran so fast and didn't care if he was punched. So, I did add ability for a player to stop him! On the other hand, Mr Tuba gained ability to push the button on the computer of doom to end the game.

Then I increased the size of the level by little so it was no longer just a rectangle. And created the music and recorded sound effects. I put them to the game and it was time to get some sleep.

Fourth day

On a fourth day was normal work day for me. After the work was done for that day, there were about 2 hours to finish the game before the event was going to end.

I then created the package for MacOS and Windows and submitted them for the game. It was over. Rough days

Lessons learned

Like I mentioned at the start, I think it was great learning experience for me. And here is the list of the stuff I think I learned most:

• Using Playmaker and EcoSystem
• How to use Blender to rig the model
• How to use Mixamo for own models
• Using animations in Unity
• NavMesh
• Should have used FSM templates when copy-pasted the another enemy

Would like to see new Playmaker jam in the future!