Blobber is released to the wild . It's a cute, casual game where you play as a blob that runs around eating yellow blobs and avoiding red blobs. It's a really simple concept, but it's been such a fun project to work on. And It's very cute.

Background

This project began as our first game jam attempt between myself (snarfum/eric wroble) and my team member (viewtifulJoe/jonas bengio). Jonas immediately jump on the opportunity to participate and what started as a quick call to chat which ended with a plan to join a 72 hour game jam. We selected ScoreJam #26 from itch.io's huge list and were off to the races. 

Game Jam

The game jam theme was "Collect". We brainstormed immediately: considering such ideas as collecting boogers from a nose (I kept suggesting this one 👃), collecting teeth from a mouth, collecting musical notes from an environment. As it was our first game jam ever, we knew it would be wise to keep the concept simple. There was really great advice I encountered: 

If the game jam is 3 days long: Get it done on day 1 and spend the remaining time fixing and polishing.

 With that in mind, we arrived at our profound idea. 

✨ Be a blob, eat good blobs, avoid bad blobs. ✨

Simple enough, right? 😁 The game jam was sponsored by LootLocker and having a leaderboard was  required for submitted games. So we added a one minute timer to the game loop and award points for eating "good" blobs, while deducting points for hitting "bad" blobs. 

We planned a few extra features to the game to provide more interesting gameplay: 

1. Player blob will grow/shrink based on score.
2. Bad blobs will chase the player.
3. Good blobs will occasionally transform into bad blobs (temporarily).

Now that we had the game loop done, we moved to getting a sketch of the game map and brainstormed the systems and audio we would need. We created a Trello project to manage everything.  Here's a sketch of the map from our first brainstorm session:

By day two of the game jam, we had a very complete game loop (player movement, map, timed rounds for end state, collecting points to increase score). Though all the blobs were just spheres bouncing up and down at this point. 

On day three, we had a pretty good looking game together. Albeit, missing a few features that we initially considered. 

While we were really close to having the game done, we also realized that we would not complete the remaining work in order to get the game submitted in time. I ran into several issues while creating the WebGL build from Unity which took a few days to iron out by the end of it.  So we missed the game jam deadline.... But we were so smitten with the project that we decided to complete it.  We were also committed to following through and finishing what we started. So onwards we went!

Post Game Jam Enhancements

As we could find time between our other jobs and projects, we spent the next two weeks working on fixing bugs and big visual enhancements to the game. I was grateful to have more time to implement the systems of the game as I was encountering a lot of new Unity frameworks that were new to me. I wanted to make sure I really grokked them so I could leverage that knowledge going forward. I made great efforts to keep my code really lightweight, modular, and reusable. (Check out the github project here). 

So overhauled existing systems to use the following: 

1. 🤿  Object Pooling: Improve performance when managing the creation/destruction of objects in a scene. This is must-know for game dev, it's pretty straightforward and has such a great impact on frame rate.

2. 🤖 State Machine: I'm very pleased to implement a state machine for the characters in this game. The state machine improves on a massive character controller classes with nested `if` statements by allowing it to only concern itself with the current state. It's wonderful and I expect to use frequently. Performance gains here and make things super easy expand going forward. 

3. 📻 Audio SFX Manager: This feature was born out of the issue that WWise audio middleware doesn't support WebGL builds (something Jonas and I didn't realized until we fully implemented everything using WWise xD). So I built an audio SFX manager based on the tutorial from Sirenix's youtube page (company responsible for the popular Odin plugin for Unity game engine).

4. 🏔 Unity Terrain: Finally spent some time learning the features of the Unity's terrain. I'm really pleased with the flexibility and speed of it. I can iterate quickly, which is really important. My hours making D&D maps for VTT games has come into handy here with blending textures 🦄.

5. 🧭 NavMesh AI: Another native system from Unity that I wanted to explore. This is a really great and simple system for moving the blobs around the map and handing avoidance of obstacles and the like. I feel like I can leverage some of the handy API calls even better to improve the logic of my blobs.

6. 📈 Leaderboards: The game jam was sponsored by LootLocker who provide a really convenient SDK to help implement and host leaderboard data into your Unity game. I found it really easy to work with and has a bunch more features I'd like to explore for storing player data. I will definitely consider using this again in future projects where I have a need.

Release

About 3 weeks after beginning the project we had something that we were really pleased with and was working as we wanted. The game was really fun and performant so I moved to complete the final polishing, bug fixes, and artwork for the itch.io page. I also got distracted and created a fake game cartridge to put our game "sticker" on. 

As this game is largely just for fun and an opportunity to teach ourselves some skills, there wasn't any meaningful promotion. So we got all the assets together and uploaded to itch.io and clicked publish!

Conclusion & Going Forward

Holy hot dog we had fun. Game jams are really challenging but I'm totally hooked on the excitement of bringing an idea quickly into existence. We're both looking forward to future projects as we can find the time. We think this game is adorable and hope that it makes you giggle or smile or break up your day in a nice way. 

We don't have any scheduled plans for enhancements but we have plenty of ideas that we'd consider adding to the game. We are happy with the current version but may occasionally revisit to add things here and there. Importantly, I'll fix any issues that prevent gameplay to make sure things work great for everyone. 

If people really love this game we may consider giving it more of our time. 

We hope it puts a little smile on your face as it does ours. 😁

About Us

🧙‍♂️ Snarfum/Eric Wroble

I've been a game developer for 3 years and a developer for 10 years. I have been working on a long term game so I was really eager to try my first game jam. I make music under curios which I think is pretty neat. 

Developer Portfolio
Curios Soundcloud

👨‍🚀  Viewtiful Joe/Jonas Bengio

Seriously talented music producer releasing music under viewtiful joe. He has spent the last few years developing an incredible skill for audio production in video work and games. Seriously, check out his instagram for his audio experiments. They are awesome and inspiring. 

Jonas Bengio Website
viewtiful joe Soundcloud
viewtiful joe instagram