The project
Oh no! Grandma got lost in a construction site on her way home! Can you help her get out of there without breaking any bones?
This project was made for the Unwrap jam 2023, which was a physical game jam taking place over 2.5 days in Kortrijk. The theme for this jam was “fragile”.
In the game, you play as the cat of an old lady who got lost in a construction site. You have to help her get safely to the other side. You can run, jump and pull switches.
Grandma always keeps walking, and breaks her bones every time she falls. You have to manipulate the level in order to find a route for her.
The game was awarded second place out of 29 games by a jury. Even though it was very short, people liked the idea and design of the game a lot.
My contribution
This game was made over the course of 2.5 days. We spent half a day brainstorming together after which I did level design and took up more of a lead role in the project.
I was quite excited for this jam, since it was the first physical game jam I would participate in. The jam itself was really cool: the vibe, eating together, the sleepy people in the morning… All of it just added to what makes a regular game jam so fun. Seeing all of the teams working on their projects gave me a lot more motivation to finish our own project. Here are some of the main things I learnt from this jam:
- Don’t be affraid to scrap stuff: We made a lot of things during the jam that eventually didn’t make it to the final game. This could have been avoided with better time management. However, if we hadn’t decided to scrap that stuff, we would never have finished the game in time. I learnt that you have to be able to kill your darlings.
- Taking the lead a bit more: I feel like, apart from working on my own stuff, I checked in a lot with other people from the team what they were doing. This was a bit of a difference from Heartbeat, where everyone already had a clear job and direction
Since we had 2.5 days to make the game. We decided to spend half a day on coming up with concepts. I personally really liked the “fragile” theme of the jam, it had a lot of possibilities. We spent half an hour brainstorming individually to get some ideas, and then afterwards discussed our best ideas in group.
After deciding we would make the grandma concept, we spent some time coming up with possible mechanics and designing some mockup levels for them to see if they worked. Here are some mechanics we came up with:
- Pressure plates and switches: These are the main way for the player and grandma to interact with each other. Pressure plates can be stepped on by both the player and the grandma and are active as long as either of them stands on the plates. The player can for example open a door for the grandma, and then she can open a door for the player. Switches can only be pulled by the player and stay active once pulled.
- Catching the grandma: This was a cool idea but it relied too much on timing, while our main focus was platforming. It also gave the player too much freedom and made a lot of the mockup level designs too easy to clear. We decided to scrap it.
- Matresses: These are essentially a better version of catching the grandma since they are tied to a specific spot. We decided to make them movable by platforms to allow for cool puzzle design.
- Wind turbines: These make both the player and grandma float in the air. They can be connected to buttons that either turn them on or off. They can be used as an obstacle or as a traversal mechanic.
- Bouncing on the grandma: This could’ve been a cool mechanics but by the time we thought about it, all of the level ideas we had already came up with would’ve been broken by it. We were on a tight schedule and the mechanics were already deep enough.
- Checkpoints: I know this sounds like a pretty boring and self explanatory mechanic, but deciding how they would work was pretty hard. In the end, we made them only trigger when the grandma touched them. This makes sure the end goal of each section is to get the grandma to the end. We also made them a one way wall for the grandma: once the grandma triggers them, she can no longer walk back. This is another way of making each section a separate challenge.
While half the team started programming and the other half started making art, I did the level design for the game. We did this because the level design was one of the biggest question marks for us. Looking back at it, I would’ve done it differently. I think it would’ve been better for me to help with programming first and only do level design once the base mechanics were programmed and testable. It kind of felt like I was level designing blind now.
I spent half a day designing levels, and in the end we only used about 25% of it in the final game. This is partially because of time constraints (placing the level in engine took a lot longer than anticipated) and partially because some sections didn’t work as inteded with the way the game was programmed.
I’m still very proud of the level I designed for the game though, both the unused parts and the parts that ended up making it in.
During the first day, we had two people working on art. Once we hit the second day and reviewed what still had to be done, we noticed that the art would never be finished. That’s why me and Ethan started looking into art packages.
We found some cool ones that all fit together (see credits) and started editing and importing them into Unity. We had to be a little bit creative for some things but I think they all fit and look the part in the end (for example: We used the conveyor belt as a platform, the piston as a wind turbine and an edited version of the cardoard box as a matress).
I also did the particles in the game and implemented a lot of the animations. I helped with building a big part of the level using the art assets.
One of my favorite things I did for this game is actually the game over sequence. The grandma exploding into a bunch of blood and wheelchair parts always makes our players laugh the first time it happens.
The screenwipe is a good way to disguise the reset of our scene, and I think it looks quite cool as well, even though it’s really simple.