Pair-Dice Dating: Sentenced to Die

Pair-Dice Dating was a submission for the 2022 GMTK jam, with the theme being "Roll of the dice". We participated with a rather large team of 9 people, with me being one of two programmers. With most people opting for puzzle games involving dice, our team wanted to take a different and unique approach, so we settled on making a dating simulator where you throw dice containing words to fill in the blanks.

Pair-Dice Dating ended up scoring #19 overall out of ~6000 submissions! We were all very proud of our efforts and it was the most fun jam I have participated in.

I really wanted to try my hand at implementing the word scoring system. We linked up the project to Google Sheets by using a free plug-in from the asset store. Once the project was linked, we started filling out data.


The sheets contained all the words that should appear on each die, what words each character had biases towards, and the date sequences themselves. The date sequences were written line-by-line, and whenever it was time for a prompt that the player could respond to, the line would be written as ?Q1, ?Q2, etc which would start the dice throwing part of the minigame.


All of the words are either nouns, adjectives or verbs, and the prompt blanks have certain categories of words that will award bonus points for being somewhat grammatically correct. The total score of your answers would be the grammatical bonus and the characters word bias added together.

For the dating minigame I implemented the dice rolling. The dice used rigidbody physics to make them bounce and roll around, and once they stop rolling, the rotation of the dice would get checked to see which side landed face up. Then the word for the correct side is fetched from the google sheet and added to the list of options for the player.


I worked on the camera, making sure it felt nice to control, and could smoothly transition into the dates. Other than that, I also implemented animations, some sound effects, and switching character sprites depending on how much they liked the player answer.

Kojan

Kojan was a submission for Ludum Dare 49. We were a team of 2 programmers and 3 artists. I implemented the main functionality of the deteriorating treehouse, picking up planks in the forest and using them to repair the treehouse.

When all the functionality was in place I focused on making the game very atmospheric. I created particle effects for the rainstorm, and I set up post processing. Whenever you get chased by an enemy and the enemy gets close to you, I increase the film grain and vignette of the post processing, and overlay a static noise, which makes it feel more threatening and spooky.

We ended up placing #1 in mood out of ~3000 submissions!

Goatwrath

Goatwrath was my submission for Ludum Dare 43, and though it‘s not that impressive, it was my first ever jam game. I had just made a few small games in Unity before, mostly following tutorials, and I was not yet very confident in my ability. I was very nervous to participate, and was not expecting to even be able to finish a game on time.

I participated in the Compo, meaning you have to make the game entirely by yourself in 48 hours, instead of getting 72 hours and working in a team. The theme was "Sacrifices must be made", and I based my game on Binding of Isaac.

The game has you fight through several rooms of enemies by aiming with your mouse and shooting. In-between each room you get access to some services such as healing, a potion shop and weapon upgrades. You can choose to sacrifice the shopkeepers by "eating" them to gain permanent buffs. I added npc portraits for the shopkeepers and even had spare time to implement unique dialogue for each of them if you choose to sacrifice the other shopkeepers. I was very happy with what I made and exceeded my own expectations. Overall this jam increased my self-confidence a lot in making games.