Logdans is a game i, together with a group of four people designed and created for a 2 day game jam that a university held. I was responsible for creating the character movement and abilities. Aswell as creating several survival events. The game Logdans is a party game where the goal is to survive holiday themed disasters on a ever dwindling playing field.
This game was created as a part of a themed game jam that a university held. The theme of the Jam was summer night. One large focus of the jam was balancing the time we spent discussing and coming up with cool ideas, versus how much time we spent scripting the ideas. How much we wanted to plan ahead before starting to work, and how much we wanted to adhere to the theme of the jam when creating our idea.
When designing the initial game idea i wanted a game model that we could develop the base quick, and then build upon with the remainder of the short timeframe. With this goal in mind i pitched the idea of a event based survival game. Where we would create a event system, and a arena, so we could just add more and more events until the time ran out.
Since it is a party game we wanted to limit the round timer so if someone died early they did not have to wait for so long. To solve this i pitched the idea of the breaking floor to act as a round time limiter. Not only do the events threaten the player, they also destroy the floor in their wake creating a ramping difficulty as the players have less and less ground to work with.
To let the players freely express their distaste towards each other i added the kick. To allow players to hasten their enemies inevitable demise through kicking each other of the stage.
To keep the kick feeling responsive like the rest of the game, i made the animation have little to no startup. This system allows players to not have to predict the movement of the enemies and time it with the kick. But to keep the power of the kick in line i made it harder to hit by lowering the hitboxes of the other players.
As the playing field in Logdans is quite small and is ever changing we wanted to controls to feel snappy and responsive to allow players to be fully in control when navigating the crumbling floor and evading deadly kicks from other players. The controller in itself handles the kick, movement, gravity and rotations based on the controller inputs.