Ember Rain

Short Summary

This project was made during a 2-week long school assignment in which we were challenged to create a game in the first week and promote it in the second week.

During this assignment, Australia was on fire and we (Koalaura and me) thought it would be a great opportunity for us to use our skills for the greater good and try to gain as much awareness for the fires in Austalia as possible.

During the process we started the #Games4Australia to encourage other game developers join us in our cause. 2 students from our class decided to join us and create a game for Australia as well.

We started a small community with this project and even had someone on the internet submit a game to the cause as well!

We were able to fully polish, publish and promote our game!

Started an initiative to help Australia!

Started a small community for both the game and our company!

It was amazing to see random people from all over the world support what we were doing!

Inspired others to join our cause!

One of the members of our community made a game himself to contribute to the cause!

We even got to the top of "New and Popular" on Itch.io!

Shamelessly copying other games

When creating this game, we were very aware of succesful games that were similar to what we were making. Instead of trying hard to make our game unique to them, we decided to look at what makes those games so good and implement those elements in our game.

Missile & Warning

Jetpack Joyride was our main inspiration for the gameplay, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that we copied one of their best features, the missile.

The missile is a projectile that has 2 stages. In its first stage, the player is shown an exclamation mark on the side of the screen, indicating that something dangerous is about to show up. This warning follows the player on the y-axis but locks itself in place once it has reached the second stage.

In the second stage a projectile enters the screen from the position of the warning and flies at the player. We added our own missile in the form of a fireball and were very pleased with the results.

Interval System

Another thing that Jetpack Joyride does really well, is the way they spawn their obstacles. I watched this GDC talk where Luke Muscat talks about their interval system and how some of the blame of failing should be put on the game instead of putting it entirely on the player.

I created my own version of their interval system and tweaked it until it felt right, which worked great! I'll showcase the code of the interval system down below, along with a link to the GDC talk.

Accessibility & Intuitiveness

We knew from the start that we wanted to make the game as easy to play as possible. This meant that we had to avoid overcomplicated controls.

To make the controls intuitive, we challenged ourselves to use spacebar as our only method of input. This worked great, but we quickly noticed that, in order for the player to replay the game, they still had to use their mouse to click on buttons. We fixed this by simply allowing the player to also use the spacebar to progress through the menu.