Genre: Stealth
Features: High score table
Project started on: April 26th 2019
Project completed on: April 28th 2019
Approximate time spent on project: 30 hours (multiplied by three people)
Hammed Robbery is my fifth team GameJam project where I slept about 9 hours in 2 days in order to program and design levels for a stealth game centered around Ludum Dare’s 44th theme: Your Life Is Currency.
Having to code everything and design everything, I might’ve missed some spots here and there and the gameplay wasn’t tight enough to win us any awards, so I feel ultimately disappointed by Hammed Robbery. It was a safe game that should’ve been easy to make - and make good - but I couldn’t get the extra mile to that level of quality.
In Hammed Robbery, you play a piggy bank that decides to rob a bank because its owner wasn’t feeding it enough coins
Screenshots
About the game
You start outside the bank, making your way inside by avoiding security cameras, then you need to dodge hammer guards and laser beams before finally getting into the vault, where you’ll need all your wits to make bank and get to the manager’s office!
Development Log
The theme was revealed quite late on Friday - at around 9, so we went into brainstorming mode immediately. ‘Your Life Is Currency’ could’ve made for rich gameplay and system experiences but we decided to go with a low-complexity simple game again - like we had with Spiraling Out - and put a lot of effort on visual polish again, with one of us three programmers working almost solely on visuals. This was a mistake, since we only were three this time and I was left more or less alone creating basic gameplay mechanics and doing level design;
On day two, I struggled immensely with Probuilder and Navigation Agents in unity, combined with the abysmal performance of my laptop, so work went really slowly. I managed to get all three obstacle types - lasers, guards and cameras - a character moving around and coins to collect, I also managed to get the level flow working properly. I started trying to generate some music, but it didn’t ultimately work out.
On day three, I finally managed to create the last levels after a bunch of bugs and other setbacks befell me. Then we had to piece together the game with everything from the intro cutscene to the high score table at the end. Some stuff I did was okay, but the core of sneaking around wasn’t fun and the level design was uninspired and didn’t make much sense. The thing was riddled with small bugs as well and the judges didn’t seem to have that great of a time playing the game - one couldn’t even get past the first level.
That’s how these things are I guess, you win some, you lose some.