Overview

This short Jam project game merges tower builders with typing games: Choose your favourite plant and make it grow by typing words quickly.

My contributions to the project include:

  • Procedural plants - I implemented a system where plants can stack on top of each other.

  • Typing feature - I implemented a way to detect when a letter is typed on the keyboard and broadcast it to the text on the screen and to a script that manages when you finish typing the text.

My Role - Gameplay Programmer

Genre - Arcade

Engine - Unity

Platform - PC (Global Game Jam)

Team size - 4 people

Duration - 48 hour

Procedural plants

Since this is a tower-building game, it's essential to connect each piece of the plant in alignment with the direction of the written word. To ensure seamless connections, each piece defines both upper and lower connection points.

When adding a new piece, the lower connection point of the new piece snaps to the upper connection point of the previous one, creating a smooth and continuous structure.

Despite the simple design due to the nature of the game jam, I developed a setup that allows me to support any plant shape with a single script. This flexible system ensures that various plant structures can be created and connected seamlessly without needing separate scripts for each one.

For the typing part of the game i avoided for lack of time the new input system, so i used to listen each frame the Input's is-key-down for each alphabetic key on the keyboard;

Once an alphabetic key is pressed the letter will be sent to both word and if match the last letter required, them the right letter is colored as feedback and wait for the next until is completed, that will trigger a sort of "My word is finished on the <direction>" and tell to the manager the direction for the plant to grow and pick two new words.

Profile system

Conclusions

This was my second and successful project for the Global Game Jam in Turin, where it won the local award for the cutest game. I believe the project has potential as a final product, especially after one participant pointed out that it could work well as a game for kids.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of participating in my first in-person jam with our team from Event Horizon.