Game Introduction
Taijitu is a symbol of Chinese philosophy closely similar to Yin Yang. In this game you are two ninjas ( Dark and Light) working together to defeat the skeleton army destroying your town. This is an infinite runner game which can be played either single player or with couch co-op. The single player/couch-coop style was inspired by Morkredd which I loved playing with my wife. The two ninjas can be separately controlled, they can jump, speed up, go left and right. The attached rope mechanics behaves with the help of physics and has a property that it breaks at a certain tension. There are obstacles and enemy in the game and you have to avoid obstacle and maximize enemies killed. Game received mostly positive feedback with the caveat that more type of obstacles were needed and there were some easy hacks to win the game fast. I plan to polish this game to make it more competitive and push it to android and PC/Mac. Stay tuned for more news on this one.
Tech Stack
- Game Engine – Unity
- Art – Photoshop
- Music – Garage Band
- 3D Design Tool – Blender
- Other Assets – Asset Store
Rope Mechanics - I love/hate Physics
When the theme of GameJam was announced to be joined together, I had at least 20 different ideas on what can be done in the game. Choosing rope connected ninjas might have been an overreach as developing rope mechanic turned out to be quite challenging (that too in 2 days). I started with a straight rod which can extend or shorten based on the distance of ninja but it wasn’t giving the right feel for playing with both ninjas with a magic rod between them. In order to achieve rope effect, I added a lot of break points between the rod which is connected to each other via different elasticity at different degrees of freedom. All of this was done using Obi Rope API which is very useful for creating such mechanics. So imagine a series of rod connected to each other ( around 100 in my case) and each point to the next and each point needs more force to get in tension (When player pulls it) but low force when going in bending ( when gravity sags it). Then I added a yield point to the rope which created a tension effect right before it breaks off. Overall the mechanics turned out to be good for gameplay but it took quite a while to get it right. I am planning to add more realism to the rope by adding some more property like plasticity in the rope, vibration affect when rope gets tighter so stay tuned for that update.
