Tag Archives: Unity

Biomancer

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Biomancer was our entry for ScoreSpace Jam #28 in January 2024, and it’s the last game we made as the original family team–me, Fintan, and Ellie on art and music.

You’re a wizard living peacefully on an island. You’ve let settlers move in, which seemed neighbourly enough, until they started capturing the magical creatures you use for your research. So you do what any reasonable wizard would do: send mutant minions from your laboratory to assault the settlements and get your beasts back.

The core mechanic is creature combination–you splice the front of one animal with the back of another to create your minions, and each half grants different abilities. A creature with the front of a boar and the back of a spider plays completely differently from one with those halves reversed. Your minions scavenge buildings and forests for more creatures, which fuel the creation of more minions. You lose when all your beasts and minions are gone. Your army IS your resource–every unit you send out is a unit you might not get back.

The concept is genuinely interesting, but people didn’t really engage with it. Two problems: the splicing system is hard to get your head around without more onboarding than a jam entry can provide, and we didn’t get enough animals in to make the combinations feel as varied as they needed to be. When you’ve only got a handful of fronts and backs, the “create your perfect monster” fantasy doesn’t quite land. We also ran out of time before implementing sound, which doesn’t help.

Ellie’s moved on to other things since this one, and the games we want to build now are all multiplayer, so Biomancer will probably stay as it is–a jam curio with a clever idea at its core that needed more time than a weekend could give it.

Download Biomancer on itch.io (Windows only)

Infralight — Our Love Letter to Buck Rogers

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Infralight was our love letter to Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday on the Sega Genesis–a game our whole family agrees is the best retro RPG ever made (we will not be taking questions on this).

Built for Dungeon Crawler Jam 2023, the theme was “Duality.” We ran with it literally: two types of light, two types of enemies. Robots you can see normally, mutants that are invisible unless you switch to infrared. The game is set on an asteroid mining base, and you’re assembling a party, exploring corridors, and fighting tactical turn-based battles where you issue orders and then watch them resolve simultaneously.

The ambition was there. The execution got about 60% of the way. The combat system was the centrepiece, and it was too big a stretch for the jam timeline. The first level plays through fine, but there’s a bug that stops you getting past the second combat encounter. We’d planned additional party members for levels two and three, but the clock ran out.

Our friend Miles from Bad Juice Games joined us on this one–partly as a way for us to hang out together, and partly so Fintan could learn from someone who actually knows what they’re doing. I’m a regular software guy, not a games guy, but Miles is the real deal, with experience on shipped titles like Marvel Puzzle Quest. Even with that firepower, we’d bitten off more than a week could chew.

No artists or composers on the team, so we leaned on Synty asset packs and the Badlands music pack. The focus was code, story, and level design–which is a polite way of saying “we couldn’t draw.”

Still, the core of something good is in there. The infrared mechanic genuinely changes how you approach each room, and the tactical combat (when it works) has that satisfying “plan and pray” feeling that made Buck Rogers so compelling.

Download Infralight on itch.io (Windows only, first level fully playable)

Slo Moe’s Space Salvage

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Slo Moe’s Space Salvage was our first 3D game, built for the LowestPoly GameJam in March 2022. The jam was–honestly–more about low-poly tech demos than actual games, but we wanted to make something you could actually play.

You’re Moe. Moe is a sloth. Moe runs a space salvage company, which is the sort of career choice that makes perfect sense for a sloth in zero gravity. Guide Moe’s ship through rocks and debris to collect cargo (conveniently shaped like crates of bananas, because even in space, sloths have brand standards).

WASD rotates your ship, spacebar boosts in whatever direction you’re facing. The catch is that boosting commits you to a straight line–no turning until the boost runs out and recharges. So you’re constantly weighing “do I boost now and hope nothing’s in the way, or do I drift slowly and run out of time?” It’s a simple tension, but it works.

This was Fintan’s project on itch.io (under the 7isanoddnumber account), and our first time wrestling with 3D in Unity. Turns out that going from 2D pixel art to 3D–even low-poly 3D–is a completely different discipline. But the low-poly constraint actually helped, because we couldn’t over-scope the visuals.

Play Slo Moe’s Space Salvage on itch.io

Airlocked!

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After coming 5th in our first game jam, we were feeling pretty confident. Dangerous, that.

Airlocked! was our entry for Make A Game, The Game Jam, where the theme was “Connected.” We went with a dual interpretation–aliens that are physically connected to each other when they multiply, and a power grid that connects the ship’s systems. You’re the last crew member on the USS Arkenfeld, and the ship has an alien infestation. The aliens multiply every time you open a door, and you can only flush them out through the airlock if they’re all touching each other. So you’re running around, opening doors, repairing junction boxes to keep the power flowing, and trying to herd aliens into a corner.

Great concept. Really clever puzzle mechanics. The kind of thing that sounds brilliant when you’re explaining it at 1am on day two of the jam.

The execution, though? The game more or less didn’t work. We had to make a silent YouTube tutorial video because players couldn’t figure out what was happening–which, in hindsight, is a pretty clear sign that something has gone wrong with your game design. If you need a video to explain a puzzle game, you haven’t made a puzzle game. You’ve made a riddle with a download link.

Built in Unity, runs in the browser. It’s pixel art, it looks decent, and if you squint hard enough you can see the good game hiding underneath the bad UX. One of those “great on paper” situations.

Play Airlocked! on itch.io (good luck)

Tomb of the Snake King — Our First Game Jam

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In early 2021, I was living in Seattle while my family was back in Ireland. Covid had made the world very small, and we were running out of ways to spend time together across nine time zones. So when Zeno Game Jam 3 came around with the theme “It Never Ends,” we figured–why not make a game?

Tomb of the Snake King is a rogue-like snake-like (a genre I’m fairly confident we invented). You venture into a tomb to grab cursed treasure that trails behind you like a growing serpent tail. Dodge mummies, avoid scarabs, don’t touch the walls. The “It Never Ends” theme fit perfectly–the longer you survive, the harder it gets, because you’re literally getting longer.

Ellie, who was twelve at the time, did all the art and music. The pixel art has a charm to it that I genuinely couldn’t have produced–sometimes having a twelve-year-old’s sensibility is exactly what a game about raiding cartoon tombs needs.

We built it in Unity, targeting browser so anyone could play it. WASD to move, and the whole thing runs in a few minutes. It’s the kind of game where you die, say “one more go,” and then it’s 2am.

We came 5th overall out of the jam entries. For a first attempt–a family scattered across the Atlantic, cobbling a game together over video calls–that was a massive boost. It went from “that was a fun experiment” to “so when’s the next jam?”

Play Tomb of the Snake King on itch.io