Beacon of Hope was the first game jam submission I've ever worked on. I was on a team of 4 on we ended up winning the award for Best Art. I had a great time working on this game and I learned some new skills doing so.

My task on the game jam was level design, all of the enemies, all of the VFX, and implementing all of the game's animations for the player, pickups, and enemies. For level design, I asked the artist for a particular tile palette and then made it work with Unity's tile palette system. I then made the starting third of the game map.

Another tasks I had on the game was making all of the VFX that the game needed. This included ambient firefly particles that actually gave off light which reacted with the sprites, the flaming smoke particles that fly off of the enemies when they get by the focused beam of light from the player, and the end victory particle effects. These three things were very fun to make and I did my best to have them fit the game world and also for them to react with all of the sprites in realistic ways.

One of the other tasks I had was coding all 4 enemies that were in the game. I used an A* pathfinding package and taught myself how it worked and then programmed each of the enemies to have unique AI behaviors. All of the enemies wandered around a set area and when the play got too close, they would chase the player with pathfinding and when the player got too far, they would wander around the player's last known location for 4-6 seconds and then pathfind back to where they initially spawned in when the game started. The audience thought that the enemies worked very well and they liked the different states that I added to them.

The last task that I had was implementing all of the animations that the artist made. This was just simply cycling between different sprites depending on the player's last input direction. The enemy sprites were dependent on the player's location relative to the enemy. So, they would either look up, down, left, or right depending on which side the player was compared to them.

In the end, this was a very fun game to work on and it proved to myself that I could learn a lot of new things in a very short amount of time. It also showed to me that I could work with a team of strangers and make a complete game in under 48 hours. I would gladly do another game jam... I just need the time to do one! :)