Brackey's Game Jam 2021

The Brackey's 2021 game jam was my third game jam and I must say this one seemed much calmer than the others. I've built a lot of useful assets over the last couple of years and using some of them as a base while getting started helped a lot here. I decided to use some of the buildings and cars from Casual Pursuit to set the scene and grabbed some ground textures from the Unity asset store to get something looking pretty good. Next I grabbed some low poly characters from the asset store for the zombies and citizens as placeholders while developing however these were swapped out for my own ones that I created on the final day of the jam. Mixamo was once again a huge timesaver here, being able to rig and animate multiple characters so quickly is just a huge bonus when you're under pressure.

The theme for this jam was "let there be chaos" and I hope that driving a digger through a town chasing waves of zombies while trying not to run over the very people you're trying to save is chaotic enough. I got the idea for this theme from my new job I'm due to start in October working with Unity to create demo and simulation software - basically I just wanted to make a game with a digger in it. I must say I've got a lot of respect for people who drive diggers for a living, it's hard enough trying to steer one in a game when the controls have been simplified down to effectively two "sticks", I imagine I'd suck at trying to drive a real one.

I decided to keep with the low poly style as it's faster to create models and performs better in the web. I also decided to give Ragdoll physics a go to try and get some cool effects from smacking zombies around and it looks better than it did with simple capsule colliders but I'm not quite sure it worked as well as I had hoped. The zombies just don't fly as far as I had hoped, not sure if that's something I've done wrong, or whether I just need to add some fake forces to the bodies to get the desired effect.

The one thing that didn't go to plan was the Cinemachine clear shot cameras, I wanted to use these to avoid the digger getting obscured by the buildings but for some reason it just wouldn't switch to the alternate view. After spending about an hour playing around with various layer and tag settings I gave up and decided it would have to wait until after the jam.

I hope you enjoy this short little game and please leave a comment below or on the game page to let me know what you thought.