• Design

Global Incineration

When day breaks, EVERYTHING breaks!

Winter 2011

Role: UDK Meister, Lead Designer

Engine: UDK

Development Time: 48 hours

Produced for Global Game Jam 2011

Global Incineration is a game where players explore the dangers greenhouse gases... by representing them as paddles in a delightful game of Breakout, wherein you--THE SUN--mercilessly bombard major cities of the world with your rays, reducing them to ash and rubble!

This is a game I helped develop for the 2011 Global Game Jam, the theme being "extinction." We went through the various means of extinction we could possibly explore, settled on global warming, and I started bouncing ideas around with the group on what kind of (SIMPLE) game we could make out of it, outlining an idea for a game wherein the player shoots orbs of sunlight at major cities and bounces them off the bottom of clouds. Our producer, Adam Price, naturally took a humorous bend to it, setting each level's music to a jaunty tune. The game was developed entirely with Kismet, with no external scripting to speak of.

What Went Right

• Team Spirit - Team Triple Penetration Games put on the best show in the whole school, consisting of 9 people working around the clock to get this thing into shape. We had so much team spirit, in fact, that within those 48 hours Adam and I produced T-shirts!
• Collaboration - The whole team was on hand all the way through the Game Jam, making it easy to solve problems collaboratively.
• Pipeline - Many of my past projects were marred by a flawed pipeline that made it impossible to implement assets; in this case, though, our pipeline was liked greased lightning, as we had enough people on hand who were familiar with the ins-and-outs of developing UDK assets that I hardly had to worry. I'd just say "give me the package for Dubai," and Mark, the art lead, would go, "okay" and hand it to me. We owe no small thanks to this to Drop Box, which we had set up prior to the Game Jam.
• Basic Implementation - The game's core mechanics are all present and accounted for. Though there's a few misbehaviours as far as the sunlight orb's physics goes, it works.
• Fun Factor - There's something about watching that thing bounce.

What Went Wrong

• Choice of Engine - UDK was not the right choice for this type of game. Ideally we would have had procedurally generated levels and obstacles, but we had to lay them out by hand because--oops--UDK doesn't support prefab spawning.
• Physics Issues - Getting the ball to work consumed 6 hours of time simply because UDK's physics did not want to cooperate. Eventually Adam and I had to dissect how the vectors worked and jury rig a system to override the ball's velocity so that it behaves frictionlessly.
• Clown-Shoes Bullshit Coding - Tap "Escape" a couple of times while playing and you end up in a blank Unreal level. Yeah, we never replaced the UDK avatar. This whole thing is done entirely with Kismet and UIScenes, which took some creativity and got the job done but ultimately isn't the way you'd want to launch a game.
• UIScenes - We used an older version of UDK so that I could employ UIScenes as a means of overriding input and developing menus. Unfortunately the UIScene system is extremely finicky about when and where an input will actually work, which led to a lot of menus being a little bit on the buggy side. We unfortunately didn't have enough time to replace them with GfxUI components.
• Accessibility - There is no tutorial for this game. As such, you'd never guess that Q and E control the cloud and that A and D aim the sunlight.

Conclusion

Global Incineration was undoubtedly the must successful and enjoyable game jam I'd ever worked on, thanks in no small part due to Adam's role as producer. He kept the team's spirits high and the ball rolling, helping everybody solve problems and being ready to pick up the pieces at a moment's notice if things came crashing down.

Many technical problems kept us from winning SCAD's trophy, but come Spring Break we have plans to re-implement the game in the Unity game engine, expand on its design a bit, and get it ready for a web launch. After everybody put so much hard work into it, Adam and I both agreed that the team deserves to see this sucker come through as they envisioned it.