Jump Ship!
Poster
Game Image
Game Image
EngineUnity
PlatformMobile and Web
Duration8 Weeks
Team Size4 Members
Current StatusReleased
Development

I developed this project alongside a few friends with the purpose of honing in our game development skills - especially for mobile applications built in Unity. The team consisted of two programmers (including myself), and two artists. While we stuck to our roles for the most part, when extra work was needed in certain areas, we'd all try to help each other out.


I completed work on the following areas:

  • Player interaction
  • Gameplay functionality: item pickups, score, abilities
  • UI Implementation
  • Porting to web application for itch.io

Overview

Jump Ship is an infinite runner where the player can fight off pirates, use powerups, and more importantly plunder the seven seas! When planning this game, our core inspirations were popular games like Temple Run and Subway Surfers. We wanted to try our hand at creating our own version of popular mobile games we enjoyed playing.


Player Interaction

The first steps I took when starting the project were getting the player to infinitely travel and swap 'lanes'. This allowed for a quick prototype to be created so that we could fine-tune our gameplay early. Once the gameplay actually worked I could start keeping track of important information like score, and money. During this time, the other programmer worked on procedural generation.


Gameplay Functionality

We knew we wanted some sort of powerups for the game, to help keep the gameplay interesting and more engaging. We settled on fruits to go along with our somewhat tropical vibe. They are bright and colorful so hopefully the player would see them as something good and worth picking up. To keep things random, we created three fruit, with three levels that could spawn for a total of 9 possible powerups to pick up. Because lemons are yellow they give 15, 25, or 50 coins. The limes are sour, so they give you extra damage in the form of 1, 2 or 3 cannon balls. And finally, the oranges being oh so sweet, give you a shield that lasts 1, 2, or 3 seconds and breaks after the player hits an obstacle.


UI Implementation

One of our artist created some pretty cool UI elements, and it was my job to breathe some life into them and give them functionality. About half of the user interface functionality was in stats that I was already tracking behind the scenes. These included score for the run, highest run score, money, and the number of cannon balls that the player had. This part was mostly connecting a few wires from the backend game stats, to the UI text boxes. The remainder of the UI was for a shop system that was yet to be implemented... so that became my new job. The shop system is a way for the player to purchase new ships for the gold that they've been collecting on runs. We have over half a dozen ships that can be purchased, and you can play with any of the ships you've unlocked.


Porting to Web

This project was specifically designed to be a mobile application, however we also wanted to publish the game to itch.io. Because we only used simple swipe actions (up, down, left, and right) for our controls, I was able to map the actions to a keyboard's arrow keys. Simple enough right? Actually, for once in my life, getting this working really was this simple. It took about an hour to make sure that all of the features were working as intended on a web build and we were up and running in no time! I finally caught a break in game programming with this one :D