Reflector – My First DigiJam Game


Play Reflector

View Reflector source
Rusher Game Engine v2.1

Controls:
Move – Arrow Keys
Shield – Z Key

Gameplay:
Use the shield to capture enemy bullets.
Turn off the shield to return enemy fire.
Basically you’re invincible if you keep holding down Z. I’m not going to fix all the bugs. It’s a game jam, after all.

A group of friends of mine at DigiPen addended a lecture given by the president of DigiPen’s Game Engine Architecture Club, Sean Middleditch. He was talking about how we should really focus on making a game for our sophomore year rather than making a super general and powerful game engine with awesome architecture (which we are still going to do anyway). He also demonstrated his successful result of building a feature-complete game in 8 hours. During this process, we are not supposed to care about engine architecture; we just hack things together and make a working game. This is the fastest way to test out prototypes and realize game ideas. Thus, we decided to start our own “DigiPen Game Jam (DigiJam)” and try to build a complete game in one day. Everyone chose a different tool, including Unity, DirectX, and XNA. I chose to program in ActionScript and wanted to test out the next version of Rusher (v2.1). It was a good practice, I spotted several flaws in Rusher’s new interface design and modified along the way as I developed my game.

We picked a random theme for our games, which is “Arcade Game”. It took me 6 hours to finish the entire game, which includes a start screen, a game over screen, a score counter, and complete gameplay. I started taking logs every hour after hour 2:

Hour 3 – Finished enemy bullet behaviors.
Hour 4 – Finished gameplay.
Hour 5 – Tweaked parameters and fixed several crashing bugs.
Hour 6 – Game completed.

It was a very short and intense development session. I felt pretty productive and accomplished. We are definitely doing more DigiJam sessions in the future 🙂

About Allen Chou

Physics / Graphics / Procedural Animation / Visuals
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