Heart Attack Play

Made with Unity & C# for the Brackeys 2021.2 Game Jam

The Brackeys 2021.2 Game Jam was my first ever game jam, I decided to give it a go since I had never really gotten into game development, since the tools seemed intimidatingly complex and making something worth playing seemed unachievable. I had recently begun following game dev creators on YouTube however, and seeing that the Brackeys game jam had a longer development period of a full week made it seem more feasible compared to Ludum Dare’s 48-72 hour deadlines. I watched the Brackeys “How to Game Jam” video to get some advice, and set about working on my first ever game with my brother using Unity, since it had the most learning resources available for it at the time. One of my big takeaways from this video was to start small and make something achievable, then up the complexity as you go along when you have time. The killer of game jam entries is having an unreasonably ambitious scope that you cannot achieve, and then not getting something done and feeling frustrated as a result.

When the theme was announced as “Let there be Chaos”, my mind immediately went to the ongoing pandemic and led me to the idea of a game where you are playing as a white blood cell, defending the body from infection by bacteria and viruses. I thought that a simple top-down shooter would be an achievable first game, allowing me to focus on implementing some basic mechanics and designing some enemies and abilities. One of my favourite elements of the game was the gene shop which allowed the player to buy upgrade ‘genes’, run by a shady RNA with a trench coat. I got my brother to design some sprites for the heart you had to protect, the white blood cell, enemies and RNA.

I had a lot of fun working on this first project, and learned a lot about Unity, C# and game design from creating a game. I had only done a few basic Unity tutorials in preparation for the game jam, so I was mostly going into the project blind, and ended up using a lot of the time to learn how to implement the mechanics I needed for my game. Playtesting throughout the game helped me stay motivated by seeing my progress, and also helped me ensure that the game was actually fun to play. Ultimately, I was quite happy with what I was able to achieve given my experience going into the project, though I wish I had spent more time on improving the interface and the visual feedback to the player, which was a week point in the entry.