2019 Winter UE4 Jam

I worked together again with Ronja and Vilma during the 2019 Winter #ue4jam and made a game.
The theme this time was All's fair in love and war..
The game is available on itch.io at: IceWuffels.
The gameplay can be seen in this video: https://youtu.be/mpGeZYeIYCI.

This game jam was different, we tried to come up an idea that fits the theme but we couldn't come up anything. So on friday (day 2) we decided that I'll just play around with particle effects because that's what I wanted to try and get better at. I had seen this video and I thought it would be fun to do a more advanced particle like that.

So over the course of friday to early monday I worked every now and then learning about particles, watching the video to see how it looked like in the particle system. Here is some progress over the days:

Added debris & mist:

Added frost on the ground, and sparkles:

The final result, it has extra sparkles when it fades out and a distortion blur effect for some power.

While I worked on the icicle particle we slowly came up with some kind of gameplay that could work. Which was that there would be 2 spells, 1 ice wall and the icicle spell. The ice wall would block rolling boulders and the icicle spell would freeze something. This image shows the assets required to do the icicle particle effect.

On monday (day 4) I first finished the icicle particle and then started working on the gameplay by implementing the wall, a big snowball etc. On tuesday the last sets of features was added and everything was fine tuned. Ronja did the level designing and added Wuffels which Vilma had 3D scanned previously.

The fine tuning included things like adding an explosion sound if the wall is destroyed and that the snowballs have a rolling sound with increasing volume the faster they roll. My favorite small detail to add was the glowing eyes on the bunnyhops. It made them much more evil looking and was fun to see the eyes glow while frozen.

Afterword

As always it was fun to participate in the game jam. Even if this time the game itself is of questionable quality. While I have a lot to learn about implementing cool particles it's very fun to practice!