My 10-day game design contest entry

[SM Sith Lord]

I participated in a 10-day game design contest over at GameJolt.com. I used the time to learn Unity engine and make a little game on it. It runs on Windows, Android, or in your web browser. There are more screenshots and a video on its profile page:

A Maze Inc. Profile Page

This is my entry into GameJolt.com's 10-day indie game design contest.


Description:
Race through player-created mazes for the prestige of your name and avatar being saved as the maze's fastest racer in the world.


Features:

Fun & simple gameplay
Global leaderboards
100% player created mazes
Easily draw & publish your own mazes
3 difficulty levels
24 challenging trophies
Cross-platform competition
Race from your Android phone



Race Mode:
Every time you start a race a random player-created maze is selected from the database.

The name & avatar of the player who created the maze is displayed on the top right. Below that is the name & avatar of the player who holds the fastest time on the maze.

On the top left is your lifetime race stats. Below that is your elapsed race time compared to the maze's fastest recorded time.

Be the fastest player to find and reach the maze exit. Memorize the maze! You can't see very far ahead and it disappears behind you!


Draw Mode:
It's just like race mode, except you can go in any direction and the maze gets created behind you as you roll around. Be sure to add wrong turns and try to trick the racers with your tactics!

Stand where you want the exit and press PUBLISH to instantly add your creation to the pool of mazes.



Development:
The theme of the contest was announced to be Party. I didn't want to just make a game about paper hats and balloons; I wanted to use the theme in a unique way. A few days later I thought of a game that depended on the player community and encouraged people to interact with each other to make the game fun; just like a real party!

Now I had to find an engine to create it on. I had heard about the Unity engine before, but I had never downloaded it myself. What better time to learn a new game engine than during the bottom half of a 10-day game contest? I looked over Unity's documentation and set out on my quest.

I planned out my design objectives to make sure I could get everything accomplished in time:

Learn Unity engine
Create a gameplay prototype using primitives
Implement the GameJolt API
Create the UI and HUD
Create 3D art assets to replace the primitives
Refine the gameplay
Create the trophy images and implement them into the game

Everything went as planned, but as you could imagine it was a damn marathon. I streamed a lot during the week, but since a huge majority of the game was made in a text editor I'm sure it wasn't very exciting to watch. It was plenty fun to do though!

I used the GameJolt API for Unity by loicteixeira. It is amazingly well-made. Thank you for that loicteixeira.

As for the 3D assets, I was able to generate everything needed using only a handful of prefabs and some very awesome code.

Then I had to create 24 images to use as trophies. Since the game depends on the player community to be fun, it was extra important that there be very cool trophies for them to race after. I broke out my vector graphics skills and drew 24 beautiful 256x256 trophy images. It wasn't until I went to upload them that I learned they get re-sized to 75x75. No worries though! Vectors scale wonderfully!

After that I considered myself finished. I spent the remaining time making sure my game would work correctly on different platforms. I added touch-screen controls for the Android; which turned out to work well as mouse controls on the PC. I also figured out how to make the Web Player version work on my own site (http://www.mazeracegame.com) as well as on GameJolt; which was a bit of a challenge to figure out without breaking the GameJolt auto-login feature.

It was all an excellent experience. I learned a lot and had a fun time. Hopefully the rest of the developers had as much fun as me making their games; now it's time to go play them!



The music loops were created for me by BAH Strike.

[Stormy]

Did you have any problems in development? Anything stump you?

Also I hate you. Your hard maps are suicide inducing.

[Garrador]

Very nice! Was quite fun actually.

How is unity?? Did you use the free version?
I'd like to have a go at it.. Heard a lot of good about it.

[SM Sith Lord]

No major problems during development, just the normal unexpected road bumps. The cloud API was in C#, and I decided to write my game's scripts in JScript, so communicating between the 2 was some what of a challenge. But once I figured out a way, it was smooth sailing.

It is built on Unity, and Unity is stupid easy. Its more like scripting than programming, and your code ties in directly with the level editor, just like the old games I'm used to working on before Source engine.

[Garrador]

Oh my goodness. I downloaded it yesterday and tinkered about with it... Didn't quite get the interface at first, and how to tie a script to a component (which is exactly how: component->add, lol).

This shall be quite fun!! (I'm doing 2D tho. saw the Unity version update video and fell in love)