Death's Driver

My entry for the GameDev.Tv 2022 Game Jam.

Theme: "Death is only the beginning"

In this game you work for Death in the Underworld, collecting the souls of the dead that have lost their path and are roaming around in the "Soul Canyon".

My motivation and goals

I used this game jam to learn and experiment a bit with Shader Graph, as well as refine some of my previous knowledge from the games I've made in the past two years.

I also wanted to try making a game in a different genre from my previous games as well as go full 3D, since I've started to learn Blender.

About the Project

The game is made using Unity 2021 LTS and uses CC0 (Public domain) free to use assets and the LeanTween library which is under MIT license.

I've tried organizing the source files in folders with the name of the sources for each asset. Those without a folder were made by me for this jam.

I also tried my best to code as orderly as possible, but it got messy after half the jam time was used up. It didn't help that I kept changing game ideas and removed stuff I'd added in the day before with new stuff. There probably is some unused code in some classes as a result of this.

As mentioned earlier, I used the knowledge I've gained from making previous games. Some examples of that knowledge used in this project:

• Unity Input System: Learned to use it while developing Riri Rhythm.
• Basic player movement logic: Implemented in DOOG for the first time, but much more refined now and adapted to use Unity's Input System rather than the old Input Manager.
• Pooling system: I learned to implement it while developing Riri Rhythm (pooling rhythm game notes). In this project it is used for all the obstacles and pickups.
• LookAtCamera script: Implemented it for DOOG (billboard 2D enemy sprites rotate to face the camera) and used in this project to align the soul pickups sprites.
• Unity's Audio Mixer: Learned about it and used it for the first time when making Chrono Crux. In this project I also improved the volume sliders for smoother volume level changes.
• XML file handling: First implemented it in DOOG for text localisation. In this project it is used to read the game level maps.
• JSON file saves: First implemented in Mumei's Memory Juggling (but with additional stuff). This project implements it on a more basic level.

Notes

Version 1.1.0 is an update made after the game jam ended.

The source code is available for version 1.0.0.