Description

Builderland 2: Origins is a game made in 36 hours during the Retro Game Jam 2015 in Montpellier (14 and 15 November 2015). We were a team of 3 developers and our game actually won the first place of the jam! ^^
Developers: Pierre Planeau, Alexandre Lecomte and Florian Torres.

The game jam was about making a “retro looking” game that would have a maximum resolution of 128×128. Also, the total of all graphical assets could not exceed 64 KB. Finally, the game had to be the sequel of a game made by the former game studio Loriciel.

The game is about a character who is seeking the origin of the building blocks dispersed around the levels. The character cannot stop from moving forward unless objects block him. The player has to make sure the character reaches the end of each level safely. For that, the player has a cursor which allows him to move some blocks around the character. Some blocks are subject to the gravity pull, some not and float. If the character dies, the level resets. The game has only 4 levels with increasing difficulty.

Tech

We used Unity 5 as our game engine. Allowing us not to have to do the engine ourselves. And to get into the gameplay and level design right away.

The game is using a tile/grid system which I built. It allows us to create levels using Tiled Map Editor and have our levels stored as XML files. Which are very easy to read and modify. The grid has three layers: level, physics and objects. The level is designed in the level layer, this is where the ground, trees, walls are placed. The physics layers handles which tiles are physical (or blocking) and which are not. For example the trees designed in the level layer are set to not be physical (the player walks through them) while the ground is physical (the player walks on them). Finally, the objects layer determines where the blocks, that the player can move around with the cursor, are.

Also, the cursor moves in the objects layer. And when the player tries to put an object in the level, the game will check the physics layer to make sure he’s not trying to put the block inside a wall.

So, for this game I did the the grid/tile systems, the auto-scrolling, managing, including and reading the assets, changing level, title screens.

The jam was featuring a prize pool, and we won the first place so we got a brand new NES in its original packaging. ^^

Download

Find the game on IndieDB.