Epic Mega Jam 2023: Antiquated Future
Premise
Epic had been organizing Game Jams for years, and while I was always curious I never took part. In 2023 my colleague was going to participate and that was enough motivation for me to take a stab too.
The theme was announced: Antiquated Future. And then I had to do the best I could to juggle life, work and getting something together for this jam.
Goal
With that theme, which combined to juxtaposed words related to time I felt I wanted to try and do something with a little time-traveler element to it. And after some time, while I spent the first couple days setting up the project, controls, etc… I narrowed down what it would be.
A puzzle-platformer where the user must take actions, then go back in time, where an “echo” of the former self would repeat those actions and the player can go and do something else - including going back in time again for a multiplied number of echoes. But there’s a caveat. Those echoes had a very clear vision of the world at the time, so that must remain. If the player crossed the echo’s line of vision (or touched it) a Paradox would occur. And thus, failing the puzzle.
As time passes, the world destabilizes, creating holes in the ground. Every echo sped the process up adding for an extra challenge.
I thought this had the potential to make for an interesting puzzle game. And hence the name of the Game: Polchinski’s Paradox.
While technically, not exactly the same paradox, it felt close enough for the game title.
Setup
Game jams are always race a against the clock. But this was my first time doing one and with work and life commitments, I hadn’t anticipated how much effort it would take certain tasks. Such as the project setup, however, that time was fortunate as it served me to think about the game I was going to build.
Once that was decided, I had the clear realization that I didn’t have time for a lot of asset development and I should attempt to be a efficient as I could be. Houdini to the rescue!
I went pretty basic and decided for a blocky-look as it would be quite easy to procedurally generate maps following that style. I created variation of brick wall, and randomly placed and sized bricks for the floor. All of these were exported as Niagara points so that I could randomly instance variations of said bricks in Unreal and thus give the illusion of a varied environment. A lot of the asset generation (such as door, character, etc) followed a similar line of thought.
On the Unreal end, the biggest challenge was to figure out how to recreate the exact movement of the characters for each echo repeat. My initial attempt revolved around having a component in the actor that would record every transform of every bone and essentially play it back on every repeat. This made for a very accurate representation of the animation but ultimately can get out of hand if there are many echoes in the scene.
While I didn’t have a particular target platform in mind, I always try to be as efficient as I can with my projects. If I can make my game run in a lower-end spec machine I would. So I decided to switch to a different approach.
One big lesson I learnt. For a game jam, if something is working, don’t re-write it. There’s no points for making it more efficient and I just ended up wasting time. However, I was happier with the new approach anyway.
Instead of recording every bone action, I recorded the inputs being performed on the character. And then used that to essentially move the other characters in a similar fashion as if they were the player pawn. While technically not exactly the same and prone for some errors. I had constrained the system enough that it would pretty much repeat the same actions very effectively. Once all the actors and components were ready. The game was ready to package and release!
One caveat. I was doing all this a few hours before the deadline. Another lesson I learnt here is not to do my first packaging of the game hours before the deadline. Ironic because it’s a philosophy I follow professionally but didn’t think about it here. Problems happened, then uploads would be slow… I struggled to the very last minute to submit both the game and a video accompanying it.
But it made it through a few minutes before the deadline.
Result
The end game was something I was very happy with! The game proved to be a little flawed in certain areas, but considering it was my first attempt, the fact that I was able to put together something that followed my goals and include two different modes (including an extra Arena mode that grew in size over time).
Nothing came of it, but it was a very interesting experience I was happy to do again after I recovered from the severe sleep deprivation.
If you’d like to check it out, feel free to download (including instructions) from Itch.io —> Polchinski's Paradox