Micro Jam 50

Hey all,

Today I participated in the Micro 50 game jam to see what I could make with Bezi in a day for a game jam.

Since the game jam theme was "aliens", the first thing I wanted to do was be abducted (one of my biggest fears). Once I had that, I decided I needed to run away from that! So I made a few planets that you had to run away from and jump to. I realized the jumping to planets took so long and wasn't that fun, so I then focused on making it more stealth-based. I added bushes to hide from the UFOs, and then added a hunter UFO type that is better at hunting.

Once I had the basic setup on one planet, the true power of Bezi came online. I used it to help me create a tool for editing the random generation of the planets. I don't remember the exact prompt, but it was something like "Look at my example planet in the scene, and create a tool that can randomly generate others of different sizes, at intervals apart" and this was the output: a nice little tool that I could add configs of the planet to. Bezi made the config asset type as well, with some examples that I just used out of the box.

I realized that the generation was not amazing, and if I wanted it to try again, I would need to clear up references. So, instead, I asked it to create buttons to add/remove/shift all items on the planet. I had a few different types of objects but it was able to create buttons for me to control some of the already places items:

This really helped me clean stuff up quickly rather than hand-editing all the game objects by hand. I made it shuffle, I would playtest, and when I was happy with values, I hand-edited a few things that were weird and was good to go!

Once I had my planets setup, I realized I needed something as a prize when you did escape. The first thing that came to mind was having tons of aliens in a dance circle....so I just made that! Finding a good model and good ol' Mixamo, I got a lot of dance animations and went to plugging it all in. 

I then decided to see if Bezi could help me add some juice. Some basic UI texts, conversations for the aliens, and trail renderers for my UFOs... it worked out but I think I could have done things a bit more cleanly if I had done it myself. But hey, it was quick!

Next was finding more free assets for the game. I found a good bush, planet textures, a galaxy skybox, and a cool little astronaut! Once I plugged that all in, I focused on finding free music and sound effects. I was running out of time and again Bezi came through. I did 0% of the sound integration, I asked Bezi to make an AudioManager and what I wanted to add... and it just magically found my code spots to add calls to audio manager! Super cool. I had audio added within minutes! It didn't find my assets but that's okay :)

This is the result of my work throughout the day today, around 12 hours. 

Enjoy this silly little game!