Voyager Play

Made with Unity & C# for the Kenney Jam 2023

After my first game jam, I had not had much time to continue exploring game development due to a combination of college work and internships. However, after I had finished my college placement and before I started my final year, I entered the Kenney Jam 2023 to try and get back into game development. The catch of the Kenney Jam is that you can only use Kenney’s pre-made assets. Kenney is well known in the indie game developer and game jam scenes for providing a large number of completely free game assets, which you can use for whatever you want without attribution or payment. These assets are often used in game jams, but also in prototypes and various other projects, and there are quite a wide range of different 2D, 3D and audio assets. The theme for this jam was exploration, and since Kenney has a large amount of space themed assets, I chose to make a space exploration game without the use of combat. Instead, my game focused on discovering new planets in a galaxy and trading resources between them in order to help them grow. Each planet had one of four resource types that it produced, and a resource type which it needed to grow. By collecting resources from producer planets, you could then give them to other planets which needed them and help them flourish, in turn improving their resource production. I experimented quite a bit with camera snapping and UI design for this game, since it was very focused on information and resource management. Since this game jam was only 48 hours, I kept the scope relatively small and used a static map which I created myself, but I had various ideas for expanding the game such as procedurally generating planets, allowing more complex interactions and dialogue with planets, and having random events occur in the galaxy which could affect things. It was quite a nice project to get back into game development, and I enjoyed making a non-combat focused game and not having to worry about asset creation. I also learned a lot about what makes these types of games fun based on the feedback I received, which is mostly making the environment more interesting and providing richer interactions with the planets.