Spitting Image
What is this?
A game built within two days during a DMU Game Development Society-ran Game Jam event in Unity. It was a chance to work with the Game Art Students, as the two groups rarely have overlap otherwise, and put some learnt skills to the test. For myself, most of them were managerial in nature as I was the de facto ‘Head Programmer’ as I had the experience and knowledge in the engine. I suppose I was also the ‘Lead Designer’ too as I came up with the initial concept and oversaw the construction while bashing out code.
The idea is that a scheming schoolboy is trapped within a mansion. He has the ability to pull reflections (as that was the Jam’s theme) out of a mirror and use them to solve puzzles. My initial pitch was using the brain-dead but possibly quite innocent copies of the main character to do anything from place them on weighted buttons to using them as dummies to distract sentry guns with. The most silly but sadistic thing was to throw them into the gears of a machine to gum up the mechanism, breaking it to allow you to progress.
The aim was for something morbidly silly with an irreverent tone as you’re using these otherwise useless reflections as pawns in your plans to get where you need to be.
The team I worked with was a dream! The art students were all professional and handled the style brilliantly to attempt to capture the bizarre tone the game suggested. They were able to pump out assets that looked immaculate with astonishing ease. I also have to mention the fellow developers I worked with who, while being rather green, threw themselves into the challenge with the enthusiasm something as gruelling as a Game Jam requires.
There’s plenty of ideas that fell by the wayside simply by the biting nature of a Jam. One was characterising the reflections to be more dopey and innocent (inspired by the turrets in Portal) to boost that schadenfreude. There were also ideas to push the reflection concept in weirder ways such as changing the player character’s appearance to create new versions of reflections. Put on a hat, make a be-hatted reflection then put him in front of a camera that needs someone to be wearing a hat in its sight to let you pass. Other ideas were about using fun house mirrors to make monstrous reflections or using two mirrors facing each other to summon hundreds of reflections at once to fill a pool or burst out of something. As soon as I am able, I intend to run with this idea as far as I can.
I worked on code for the turret, the weighted button and on the game logic itself. I also buffed out bugs and issues with the mechanics wherever I could before the deadline loomed.
Controls
To summon reflections, push F at a mirror. Push E to pick up a reflection and then push E again to drop the reflection again. Push Q when holding a reflection to throw it.