Brain Bros

igda_brainbros.zip - This version has some stuff(GUI) added and bug fixes.

This was a project started during the IGDA game jam. The main concept (as of now) is to have a two player top down game with tons of shit on screen. The players play as two brothers(a human and a zombie). The players must work together to defend a flag and each other.

The Game Jam started around 6:00 pm from Friday, January 18th until 3:00pm Sunday, January 20th. That's about 45 hours. 3 of it were trying to figure out what to do with so many people. 3 were sleeping. and the rest were hardcore development. Overall it was a lot of fun.

Who

Gameplay mechanics

  • Enemies spawn at outer perimeter and try to take out the flag.
  • Both players start out with weapons and limited ammo.
  • Ammunition spawns outside flag area so players cannot just camp on the flag.
  • As players stand next to each other, the zombie gets hungry; if he gets too hungry he eats his brother!
  • The human gains aggro from enemy zombies and the zombie gains aggro from the human enemies.

Controls

Both players have the same control scheme. It's basically a tank, left turns left, right turns right. Up moves forward and back backs up. It also works with an xbox controller.
p1 Move: wsad
p1 Shoot: e

p2 Move: ikjl
p2 Shoot: u

Engine Features

All of the gameplay logic and image support was from scratch.
Things that were implemented:
  • Verlet physics with spherical collision detection.
  • Small sprite engine with layers!
  • XML configurations to change settings like aggro radius, hit sphere radius, character speed etc.
  • Event handling framework which was new to me.
Postmortem

Time was limited and it was pretty hard to make decisions. I was almost useless for the last six hours due to exhaustion. I was trying to get GUI stuff implemented but ran out of time; I should have focused on gameplay stuff which was more important. Also a decision to implemented configurations (xml) earlier would have been wiser.

I should have made png loading possible with libpng. I didn't want to bother but that turned into a problem because the artist couldn't save as *.tga's correctly in his version of photoshop, so I would have to go and convert them with GIMP.