Last weekend, I took part in the Global Game Jam in Albi. This annual event, which brings together video game developers from all over the world, took place this year at Albi's Champollion University, with 76 participants. My company, Numix, was sponsor and co-organizer of the event for the fifth year running.
This year's theme was "Roots" and this time I decided to take on the challenge solo. I created a game in which the player guides a root through underground labyrinths to collect water resources in order to continue growing. Being alone, I opted for simple black and white graphics.
Game page: https: //globalgamejam.org/2023/games/leaf-life-2
To achieve this "living roots" effect, I used a procedural generation technique with randomly controlled Bézier curves. When the user clicks, the root moves towards the mouse, and at regular intervals, a new point is added to the curve:
I used the Perlin Noise function to achieve random behavior by controlling frequency and amplitude. Finally, I generated new roots on the newly created points, giving a convincingly realistic effect.
To make the exploratory part of the game interesting, I added a fog effect using a black rectangle with a texture in front of the entire screen. For each column of pixels, I launched a beam that detects ground level. All pixels above this point are made transparent.
To help the root discover its environment as it goes along, I've written a decreasing transparency value in the texture according to distance.
Below I've replaced the black background with a blue color to better visualize the writing of pixels in the texture:
Finally, I wanted to try out some new technologies during this GameJam, so I used GitHub Copilot. I was impressed by the efficiency of this tool, which helped me save a lot of time by suggesting blocks of code that corresponded exactly to what I wanted to do. I consider it to be almost like a second member of the team!
In conclusion, this GameJam experience was a rich learning experience. Doing a GameJam solo is an interesting experience, but it doesn't replace the experience and emulation you can get in a group.
Using Github Copilot was a real revelation. AIs are revolutionizing many fields, including programming. Thanks to these tools, programmers can concentrate on code architecture and making important decisions.
Well done to all the participants in the Albigeoise edition of the GlobalGameJam 2023. See the 24 games on the following page: https: //globalgamejam.org/2023/jam-sites/inu-jean-fran%C3%A7ois-champollion/games
And here are the other two games produced by the Numix team:
