Embedded Files
My first "finished" game project.
This was my first quote-unquote finished game, made in half a semester my freshmen year. The premise was simple - you play as bowl of spaghetti possesed by the spirit of a now deceased cowboy, hunting down the gang of criminals that put an end to the comparatively less starchy chapter of your existance.
Go get 'em, Cowboy
I had a couple of ideas in this project that I'd love to come back to some day. Firstly, the titular pile of pasta didn't have a healthbar. Instead, playing the game revolved around managing your moisture meter. Just being out in the sun would passively dry you out, and getting shot would take a large chunk of your meter (bullets are hot). You could recover it by finding bottles of Whiskey to absorb, or by skewering enemies and absorbing the moisture from their bodies.
There was another enemy type, the Buzzard. This guy was invincible and would drink up moisture. The game consisted of three levels, before it unceremoniously dumped you back on the poorly cropped title screen. The buzzards were the only instance of frame-by-frame pixel animation in the game, since the player character and human enemies were animated on a 2D skeleton. I had done that kind of skeletal animation before, but it was interesting to try and work out the best way to animate a heap of noodles. I think if I tried this idea again, I'd do something procedural in 3D.
Buzzards would patrol areas around their nests, and were invincible because I couldn't figure out how to make them die.
Overall, I'm proud of what I managed to put together in so little time with so little experience. This project is pretty much the opposite of where I've since discovered that my skills lie, being 2D in the Unity engine. I'm still quite fond of several of the ideas present in the premise, and I find myself wondering what I could do with this idea now quite often. Crucially, this project as a whole helped me prove to myself that I could do it - that I could come up with an idea and make it happen. Up until this point, I had always said that I wanted to become an independant game developer, but from here on out I knew I enjoyed doing it, and I knew that somewhere deep down, I have what it takes.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse