Rainblow
A 48 hour jam game
In October of 2013 the sixth Bacon Game Jam was announced. I had spent a lot of time in the previous two years working on a few different ideas for a roguelike sort of game. I hadn't actually finished a game after completing my unreleased Dota 2 demake "Divine Rapier" almost a year earlier. If I wanted to call myself a game developer I figured I damn well better develop a game every now and then. So I blocked out a weekend and registered.
The chosen theme was "rainbows". I had a nice complete set of isometric zombie sprites. Why not have the player destroy them with a rainbow? My approach maybe wasn't the best use of the theme but it certainly wasn't the worst. I make no apologies.
Making the game
A few weeks before the jam I spent an evening porting a python implementation of the boids flocking algorithm to Lua/LÖVE. This proved to be a good use of time because I was able to essentially drop in the boids code unmodified and use it to control a flock of zombies. I added a small tweak to allow the cohesion factor to be adjusted on the fly which allowed the zombies to scatter when the player attacked. This had a big impact on the gameplay making it a real challenge to hit more than one or two at a time.
I was working solo on this game so I cribbed most of my art from OpenGameArt.org. I really missed working with Paul on this game but was proud that I brought it all together. In the end, I placed 4th out of 97 based on participant ratings of all the entries. I got a lot of great feedback on the game.
Here's a complete timelapse of the game creation process:
The Making of Rainblow from Jay Roberts on Vimeo.
Game Notes
- Made in 48 hours
- Lua / LOVE
- Boids implementation
- Tiled maps