Electro Gun
What is this?
This was a Global Game Jam Project, brought on by a theme of ‘Transmission’. We tried to figure out a gameplay hook first and plumbed for a multi-player, split-screen, first person shooter with the gimmick that ammo and player health were tied together. You had to expend player HP to shoot your weapon and could regain HP by defeating opponents. The better you were, the ‘tankier’ you could be.
It’s a pretty simple idea that lends itself to a straight-forward, fun sounding battle of skill, that was tweaked and played around with as much as we could get away with once we got to work on it. A direct hit would return a profit of health to play with but hitting with the blast radius of the projectile hurt but rewarded only the amount of HP spent. It naturally drives players towards accuracy and care with their shots, creating friction of intent and challenge to achieve victory.
Building this turned out to be oddly annoying. Making the assets? A doddle. Splitting the cameras into quadrants of the screen? A piffle. Figuring out the rules and mechanics of shooting the weapons? A geduffneggle. Splitting the inputs from multiple controllers in Unity is surprisingly awkward to do. It takes quite a bit to recognise a single controller among the others attached with a frustratingly long set up for each. It worked but it was also horribly inefficient. Poking around on the Asset Store, we did find a better solution with ReWired; a powerful back-end input handler that could handle hot-swapping controllers, automatically assign controllers to players and make assigning controls to actions that much easier. We settled on this because it’s too powerful not to use. It makes set up and play far easier a prospect, hopefully making it a more stomach-able experience.
Still, I’m very proud of what I built, what I put together and that the whole thing comes together very nicely. It’s something of a bodge job underneath but that, in all honesty, is pretty normal for Game Jams. You expect it to be a mad dash to hammer things into place to make something presentable at the last minute, you just have to get better at it.