This year I decided to participate once again of Global Game Jam and unlike of previous years I chose another jam area as this edition was fully online. Why not participate developwith international people? So the jam area was the game hub area of Montreal (Canada).
The theme of this year was Lost and Found, and all creators decide to choose a secure path as the deadline was very tiny and we developed a game where we could have a game loop with beautiful art. And still we didn't finish everything in time. That's what game jams are all about!
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We decided for an adventure where you as the player is lost in the supermarket and you have to find your dad before going into panic. As the image shows, you have the green bar indicating your current level of panic. It keeps increasing as the time passes by, and just besides that icon you have the Dad icon indicating how much distant you are from it.
We also have the mini map which was aimed to point the dad location but we didn't have much time to work on zoom in and zoom out to better describe accurate locations.
The mechanics we have for this game are:
The player walks in any direction using WASD keyboard and can sprint for a short time pressing the Space key. That short period takes 2 seconds to complete. And it was the mechanics I was responsible to implement for the game.
Firstly, I have variables that store the character speed in normal and on rush states and the rush timer determining how many seconds that period will take.
Secondly, I have the delegates that will trigger events depending the character is rushing or not. Those events were blueprint assignable so that it made easier to tweak character speed values on blueprints.
Third, I had the Timer Delegate that will associate a function when triggered. And a Timer that starts a timer based on a float value and a function delegate that will do desired operations.
And finally, the function that setups everything when space key is pressed down. It setups the Timer, OnSpeedUp event is called, and the function associated with the timer is set.
Now, every time those two events happens, OnSpeed Up and OnSpeedUpFinish, it sets the character speed on character blueprint event graph. When the game begins, it starts with normal speed and change it accordingly to those events.
