Itch.io: https://matchagatcha.itch.io/jungle-jam
Jungle Escape is a 2D platformer where players are able to shape-shift into 3 different animals forms in order to access their various traits. This was a project split between a group of 4, including me, and was taken from conceptualization to implementation over roughly 2 months.
Pre-Development
Brainstorming took about 3 weeks of the entire process. During this phase, we met as a group for the first time, and spent the inital time bouncing ideas and getting a feel for what we all wanted out of this project. Additionally, we had to check in our ideas with our professor in order to get approval.
At first, we listed off genres that we wanted to try make, as this was our first venture into making games, until we agreed upon a platformer. After which, I remember leading the conversation into what sort of vibe it should have, and how that would translate into the actual gameplay mechanics itself.
We listed off various biomes and environments, ranging from ocean, desert, caves and such until we landed upon jungle. We believed that the fresh and lush feel would allow us to make a bright and eye-catching game, so we continued with that.
After more discussing, I came up with the idea to use the wildlife to give different platformer abilities to utilize the bio-diversity of the jungle as a unique mechanic of our game.
With that idea sticking, we created this game design doc for our professor to approve, we planned out general plans for our sprints. I, in particular helped out with listing each mechanic and asset as well as finding references for inspiration.
Development
During the first sprint of the process, we had to make a graybox build, with complete focus on functionality of the game, the complete visual barebones but all the mechanics working. This first phase I mainly focused on connecting scenes through Unity’s SceneManager, so that levels and screens can connect to one another, and ensuring that we had some basic menus with button functionality.
The second sprint had an emphasis on art and asset creation. For me, I was tasked with creating tiles and background art in Asperite, then importing those into Unity. I also made the tilemaps for the levels and re-designed the levels to make good use of the various abilities offered to the player.
When designing the levels, I took into mind what each form offered. The human can kill snail enemies via stomping, the monkey can wall climb and double jump, the bird can glide, and the snake can fit into small spaces.
I didn’t want players to only utilize the monkey form, as early testing revealed it to be the most powerful of the 4, so I made sure to include stretches of platforming where each form’s individual strength would be shown.
Also, since the jungle is known for its’ thick density of vegetation, I wanted to avoid jungle levels only using linear progression, moving from left to right.
Thus, the temple levels are more linear, offering itself as a simple intro to the mechanics, while in the jungle, players will have use more navigational skills to escape.
In the third and final sprint of the project, we focused on polishing the game. This meant adding sound effects and music, adding assets for UI design, and slight bug fixing. This was a short period of development, only lasting 1 week for quick fixing, I spent most of this time fixing a bug that crashed the game when landing upon a snail.
Post-Development
As one of my first finished game projects, I like Jungle Jam for what it is, a simple platformer that helped me get more familiar with the 2D Unity pipeline. There are a couple issues with movement that could definitely be improved in future projects. I think the monkey form is overtuned in comparison to everything else, and in a future re-creation, I would like to add more unique-ness to each of the forms.
The unique-ness of the forms were also scrapped mechanics that we were unable to incorporate in our timeline. For example, the bird was supposed to be able to air-dash once per glide. The human was supposed to be able to use his lasso to attack/rope onto things. And my personal favorite, was that the snake was supposed to be able to slither between the foreground and the background, which would be it’s own level.
But this project taught me what goes into making a game and gave me experience creating that pipeline from project planning to coding to polishing and finishing.
