Cone Breaks Out!
Project Description
Cone Breaks Out is a Unity-produced platformer / arcade -style game made for mehu jam 5. The jam had
the themes "Typo / ????? World", and we leaned heavily on the latter flavor. There were plans to
add some typos or puns as island names so many of the islands are designed to fit that theme, though
we never ended up using the names in-game.
The game has you play as a cone-cat who is looking for a new home amidst the rubble of a falling,
destroyed world. The gameplay consists of moving through the void while collecting bubbles that keep
you afloat. The void is occasionally broken up by differently stylized islands, which mainly function
as save points, though some also have shops where you can purchase upgrades.
Project progression
We started the jam off with an hour or so of brainstorming ideas, with the core idea of travelling between
islands. We planned out a few "punny" names for islands to go with the "typo" flavor of the jam, and so the
islands received their themes from there: debris, a finland-inspired region, weird stuff with eyes, and a
bloody, strange portal island. I loosely planned out some things the code should do, such as completely
separate movement systems for when the player is on an island, and when they are in the void.
During the first day, I implemented an input system, the separate movement systems, a check for leaving and
entering islands and a rudimentary interaction script. We had working movement by the end of the day, and
you could start to see where the game was headed.
On the second day, I went through a marathon of adding all sorts of functionality, such as a particle spawner
for visual flair, a saving system so the player can quit without losing progress, borders to limit vertical
movement, and implemented all assets made by our Art Director (who very helpfully made the animations into
ready-to-use assets). By now we had three islands with a functional navigation system between them, and
reasonable world borders. Day two went from 8am to midnight, with a few breaks in between.
On the third and final day, I implemented a shop / upgrade system, redid the interaction system, added a tutorial,
added player health drain while in the void, implemented orbs into the void to heal the player and give currency,
made the upgrades actually affect the gameplay, then implemented a few cc0 SFX and a cc0 ambient background track.
Then came time for the final, actually playable build, which took much longer than anticipated, though we managed
to submit the game to the jam page with a cool 24 seconds left to spare. Later that day I fixed a few small bugs,
built the game for windows as well, and went to get some much-deserved sleep.
A few days later I went back to the game to adjust the difficulty due to user feedback. While doing that, I also
went and added mobile support, as that required only a few adjustments to the input system. The game is now
most likely at its final iteration, as no further updates are planned.
The game is available on itch.io to play for free, with
separate windows- and android versions, and a web version to top it off. You can also view the GitHub page
for the project here.