Ground Zero

About the Project

Ground Zero is a short, fast-paced shooter game inspired by old shooters like Quake and was made within 9 days for the Hyper Unicorn Game Jam. This project taught me many new things that I previously didn't know and helped me better understand how other games did certain things, such as creating cool environments and making them work well with the type of game I’m making, among many other things.

Development Process

I first heard of the Hyper Unicorn Game Jam through some friends who were going to participate, but I was pretty busy around the time that the jam started, so I originally didn’t plan on participating. However, a few days later, I saw a few friends talk about it, and I thought to myself that it wouldn’t hurt to try and make a game for this jam. So I made a quick prototype, and I started to see some potential in it.

I first began by taking what I learned from making movement for other projects like my Ultrakill Vertical Slice and Unnamed Retro Shooter projects and creating a simple but fun movement system for the game.

After that, I began designing the enemies and levels. I experimented a lot with baked lighting for the first time to really make the environments pop a little bit more and to make it more performant than placing tons of real-time lights in the scene. There’s still a lot I could learn about level design, but I think that the levels I made all look pretty good!

The game was almost done, but I really felt like it needed a pause menu, so I began making exactly that. It was quite a challenge to understand, as I had never made a pause menu before but I managed to make a decent one that doesn’t really pause the game itself but does let you tweak the volume of the music and change the mouse sensitivity, which were all things playtesters suggested. And those values are saved across the whole game.

Unity Events

This was the first project where I really started to use Unity events a lot. I had previously heard of Unity events but never really looked into them more, but when I did, a whole new world opened for me. This project especially proved to me why Unity events were so useful, since I needed to quickly make things work before the time of the game jam ran out. I used Unity events to easily activate certain things and make certain sequences work.

I ❤ Unity Events

For example, the ending scene of the game used a script that let me quickly add new things to a sequence and activate them to create a cool ending to the game.

Speaking of the ending... it would be a shame not to show off what I personally think is one of the coolest things I've ever made in game development so far.

Outcome

Even though the "final" game is nowhere near perfect, I still think I can be very proud of it. I learned so many new things from making this game that I can use to create even better new games, and I don’t think I’m done just yet with this game, as I would like to eventually apply the feedback I've received from people playing this game to make it better!

Also, it won FIRST PLACE in the Hyper Unicorn Game Jam!!! Which I’m super happy with :)