Gravity Skimmer

We created a 2D platformer/parkour game, where you play as a gravity skimmer to traverse around the world (filled with menacing dangers of course...)

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All of the team members are game developers and we have all built our own games before. Therefore, the team unanimously agreed to continue our game development journey when we saw the API Ubisoft provided. While brainstorming, a 2D platformer game called "Fortress in the sky" made by some of the team members for the recent DevSquad Academy Jam (which you can find more about in this link: https://itch.io/jam/devsquad-2020/rate/873670) caught our attention. "Fortress in the sky" was made in Unity, which shares the same programming structure as the Ubisoft HackerNest API. However, Ubisoft HackerNest API provides more flexibility as all components have to be written by yourself. We also took inspiration from the popular mobile game "Jetpack Joyride", and that's where the laughter and coding adventure begins.

We decided to build a 2D platformer game where our character has the ability to manipulate gravitational forces. By controlling the direction of the gravity flow, the player is able to fly to different positions to avoid obstacles and traverse through the game world.

The Ubisoft API was quite new to all of us. Therefore, We took the time to learn ways to create with this framework. We attended the workshops posted on Youtube, read through documents such as the step by step tutorial, and played around with the sample program "Flappy Bird". Then we divided up tasks to each team member to speed up the development process. We joined a common discord server to easily communicate with one another. If anyone gets stuck on a particular aspect or has a general question/comment to announce, we would unmute ourselves and discuss. After hours of hard work, we went from knowing nothing to implement our own features within the API, and that is something we are all very proud of.

Every feature has its own unique challenges. Although the tutorial guide is handy, we have to figure out its fundamental principles and implement some of its ideas into our own game. Being able to understand how the system works and apply the ideas to our own project in such a short amount of time is really a huge accomplishment for all of us.

At the end of the day, we went from knowing nothing whatsoever about the API to be able to make an entirely functional and fun game on our own. That is something we are all extremely proud of. We also succeeded in working as a four-member team. All of us gained a new level of understanding of industry-level software development, where hundreds or even thousands of people collaborate at the same time.

We learned how to work as a team and collaborate for the same goal. We gained a deeper understanding of game development or software engineering in general. For example, some of the components and functionalities that we take for granted in game engines like Unity are not presented in the API, so we have to learn how the backend mechanics work and implement our own components. As a result, we really gained a profound appreciation for the game development environments on the market, and knowing how to program a lot of the backend mechanics is also quite fun and rewarding.

There are so many aspects that the game can be improved upon. For example, we could build more levels to extend the player experience. We could make a variety of obstacles and traps that exhibit different behaviours to make the gameplay more interesting and challenging. Power-ups and abilities could also be added to introduce more depth to the game. We are more than happy to continue developing after the hackathon!

Thank you for playing!

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