Theme Picked and Jam Started

I decided to join the A Game By Its Cover Jam 2021 since it seemed like a great way to experiment with other people's concepts and see what could come out of it. After browsing the Famicase archives for a while I picked a few favorites and ultimately decided to go with Red Eye by Brent Ashe. The case's bold, simple design looked like it could be a lot of fun to recreate and the prompt sounded doable and interesting. 

Making a game where you "... pilot an airliner between fiery rock formations as demons hurl pitchforks of damnation" sounded pretty amazing. I instantly had this third-person , infinite runner idea of a jet weaving between rocks and projectiles; all in a stylized 2-3 color palette.  Picking up passengers while you do this suddenly gave me more of a Crazy Taxi theme. However, Brent's prompt also stated it's an endless journey which had me leaning towards infinite runner again.

I wasn't sure exactly what kind of game I would make but I knew I could definitely make something out of this. I asked for Brent's permission to use his art and theme for the jam. Not only did he agree, but he seemed stoked about the idea and unhid some other pieces he had done for it on instagram. This was great as it gave me even more material to pull from for the game's style and tone.

Now I said I wasn't sure exactly how the game was going to play out but I do know what style I'm shooting for. So the first thing I did was try to recreate the of the cartridge art in 3D. I was waffling at first between a 2D and 3D style, but I went with full 3D because the thought of weaving between rocks in third person sounded too cool to pass up. If the game was still going to have that 2-tone graphic style I was going to need a custom shader. I've created shaders in Unity's shader graph before so it wasn't long until I had a basic cel shader that I clamped to only two values. 

I was really happy with how this came out. If I was careful with my lights I could probably manage to keep the whole game within 2-3 colors.

Finally, I made a bare-bones basic test of the game. I put in the features that I knew  would exist no matter what: a plane controlled by the player, obstacles to avoid, restart or end game if the player hits an obstacle. I quickly coded these three pieces and uploaded a (pretty boring) first iteration to itch. I'm excited about this project so far and ready to keep creating!