Created with Jae Lehman, Kilan “Sky” Larsen, Eric Swartz, Vanessa Villegas, and Juan Vangas
Global Game Jam 2020 was my first game development project at CSU Chico and is one of my proudest technical solutions to date. Once again, I was blessed with the opportunity to work with an extraordinary group of people who inspired me in every moment I was with them.
The theme for Global Game Jam 2020 was “Repair” and we decided to make a game about the balance between growth and decay in nature. Originally we had intended for the game to be multiplayer and to be a battle for control of the environment. My task was to implement everything except for movement, enemies, and the multiplayer aspect which was left to the other programmer.
The biggest challenge that I had in this game was creating the detection system for the game. I was given instructions that it had to follow the player and close when the player intersects with their path, enabling growth to all objects in the shape of the path.
My solution was for the player to frequently drop nodes (flowers) as they traveled which would then be stored in a list. When the player crossed a node, an invisible triangulated mesh would be generated using the nodes as vertices connecting to the center of the shape. It would then be given a trigger collider which would tell anything in it’s collision to begin Growth and then disappear in the next frame.
This allowed us to quickly and efficiently create a huge variety of shapes with surprising precision. It’s not entirely flawless as a detection system, but is very scaleable and we spent a lot of time bugfixing and removing corner cases.
Making a procedurally generated mesh is something I would never have attempted on my own and was only able to do with the verbal support of my team who encouraged me to go beyond my own comfort level. As one of the least experienced members on the team, I was given freedom to make the mechanics as I saw fit and we actually sat down to do meaningful playtests and created a good tutorial level. Each of these things are often overlooked in game jams and I never realized how important they were until then. My team brought out the best in me and this was the moment I realized that I might actually be good enough to work with my new peers. I love each of them for giving me that feeling.
You can play Decidu-run here: