Description

A Microgame I’ve made with a small team in 4 days! I am the programmer and animator of this game(Also lighting and some background assets), it is developed under the MicroMix Framework provided by Sheridan College, and music/SFX by MSSA students of Sheridan College.

It’s a game where you play as the chef or the fish, AI is created for single player mode:

As the chef, try to aim and chop the fish, and turn it into sushi!

As the fish, flop to escape to the chef’s attacks! Survive untill the timer ends!

My Role

• Animation
• Programmer
• Gameplay Designer

Tools

• Unity
• Blender
• Miro

My Work

• Gameplay Programming: Programmed most of the game, including controls, interactions, AI, animation control, etc.
• Asset Implement: Import and implemented all game assets, populate scene with objects, applied lighting, and balanced SFXs.
• Animation: Animated fish and chef.
• Game Design: Designed and balanced gameplay mechanics: chop and flop.

Development

Day 1

Sheridan Design week is a game design event that lasts 5 days, with the last being presentation.

In the first day, we focused on research and ideation. Most of us have 0 clue what “Mircro game” means, so we would have to search what it is, and what is some key factors and make up this genra. We discovered it is a extreamly short games, around 30s to 1 minute, they should have a single adjective, that is easy to understand, meaning players should be able to pick up their controller and start playing within 3 seconds.

With that in mind, we started brainstorming ideas, and created 4 initial ones, and feedback was given to each for us to analyze and improve upon these ideas.

Day 2

Day 2 we focused on editing and polishing 2 ideas based on feedback: We documented the edits and fleshed out controls, objectives and potential 2 player mode. However, our team was split on what idea to work on this point, and had long debates on pros and cons of each idea, scope, and how interesting is the interactions for each game. At last, we settled on the fish, because it had more potential for interesting controls, and is more friendly scope-wise.

Day 3

Once our team’s vision aligned, we went into development, at this phase I designed, animated, and programmed how the fish flops exactly, with 2 button controlling the animation of the head and tail, making them rise on click and flop at release, the gives it more agility and precision in controll, offering the fish player a bit more room to outplay the chef.

For the chef, I aimed for him to be slow but deadly. He has almost the same movement speed as the fish, but a long wind-up before his chop can land. Also a noise to warn the fish player that a chop is coming to allow them time for escape. It is a one shot kill, so there would be more tense between the players. And to make up for the disatisaction when the chef player misses. I created screen shakes, and scene objects flying, to let the chop action itself feel more satisfing. In this phase, I also created the AI for the chef, to look at, track and chop the fish player, with varying delays in action that makes his actions feel more human.

Day 4

On day 4, we invited players to test our game, finding misses and bugs to patch. Luckly, our game did not have much of those, so we are free to further polish.

I adjusted the lighting of the scene, making the area felt more like a restaurant, also adding placed a spot light at a certain position to create a frightening shadow on the chef’s face. I was also responsible for implementing all assets into the engine, including assets, animations, music, sfx, and even finding creative ways such as a TV, to throw some un-used asset in there that makes the scene seem more alive.

Additionally, to increase the chef player’s experience, I added death effect for the fish, that is a huge explosion of sushi. Granting a huge satisfaction on kill! Unexpectedly, sometimes the amount of sushi can crit! If a chop landed on multiple colliders at once, created an unexpected good effect~

Day 5

On Day 5, we presented our game on the event! And had tons of people laughed crazily when playing it! Including myself and some friends!