
Puffed Up!
Video game project, made with Unity in a team of 6
Genre: Side-Scroller
Last updated: September 2024
Play in browser: Click here
Intro
My game-development friends and I have put together another project for the Game Maker’s Toolkit (GMTK) Game Jam. Released in 2024, Puffed Up! is a side-scrolling video game that stars a timid young puffer-fish named Puffy. With his ability to inflate & deflate, Puffy evades the humans who are trying to turn him into sashimi.
Game Jam Theme
The jam’s theme was ‘Built to Scale’. This prompt is open to interpretation, although the most common approach among the entries I reviewed was “a game where assets change size in some way”. Our team had trouble with brainstorming, until the idea was brought up to make a game starring a puffer-fish. Just like in real life, Puffy would inflate himself to scare away enemies. To add some gameplay appeal, it was decided that deflating Puffy would cause him to launch forward.
Compared to the Last Project
2023’s project Type for Me! was the result of our team scaling back ambitions from the projects of years past, trying our best to focus on an enjoyable gameplay loop and charming presentation. In contrast, Puffed Up! was overly ambitious once more – this time because the team was overly confident in the lax time restriction, leading to a rush in the final two days of development.
Summary of Development
This year’s jam increased the time-limit for development from 48 hours to 96 hours. Within that time our team had to create a video game from scratch. This time, we had an extra programmer on hand (up to 3).
The first two days of development was spent on creating level scenes and a functional player controller. This included systems like puffing logic for Puffy, taking damage & recoil, floating physics, health states…
The third day of development, we ramped up our efforts to deliver a MVP. The game’s graphics & sounds were mostly done, being brought together with the code the programmers had written to this point. The game was mostly playable, but we required levels and bug-fixes.
On the fourth and final day, all members of the team worked until near the deadline. Three levels were created, game mechanics were given polish, the UI was finished, and opinions were gathered from play-testers which helped us to assure quality. The final release had one major bug – Level 3 was inaccessible unless the player performed certain actions. This last-minute fumble on my part has taught me to deliver MVP’s for game projects sooner – it was disappointing to realise that 1/3rd of the game was inaccessible to players during the voting period.
Version History
Version 1.0 released for the jam had some unfortunate user-experience bugs, and a month later Version 1.0.1 was released to fix these issues. In future, a Version 1.1 will add a few minor improvements before the project is shelved.
My Project Responsibilities
Version 1.0
– Code for Puffy, enemies, game logic. Especially physics & bug fixes
– Directed the vision for the project. Helped decide the story, gameplay mechanics, assets that were required, etc.
– Unity animations, UI, Level 1 layout
Version 1.0.1
– Fixed bugs reported by players (mostly performance & sound)
– Add level transitions & tweaked gameplay balance
To play the game in your browser, visit the itch.io page for the project! Windows and Linux versions are also available.
> > > Click here to visit the Itch.io page < < <
The source code is currently private, it’ll be made public at a later date.
