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Subspace Shootout

Five Person Team | Bigmode Game Jam 2023

Nov-Dec 2023

The planet Werth has been under attack by the Schmaliens for years, with no way to fight back... until now. Pilot a combat space ship into battle for your planet, and hold out as long as you can. Unfortunately, being the first model of its kind, the ship requires a bit of upkeep inside the cockpit while you fight.

Switch between two modes —piloting your ship, and maintaining your cockpit— in this shoot 'em up space sim!

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On Itch here!

On GitHub here!

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Responsibilities:

I was one of the primary programmers / designers on this project as well as 3D and 2D artist.

My responsibilities included:​​​​

  • Design

    • Enemy and upgrade design

    • Gameplay design

    • Ship layout design

  • Programming

    • Ship interaction

    • General game systems

  • Art

    • 3D and 2D asset creation

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Recognition:

Chosen for a judge's choice award and placed 4th in theme out of 488 entries.

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SubspaceShootoutBrainstorm.png
SubspaceShootoutPrototype.png

Tools / Languages Used:

Unity, C#, Visual Studio, GitHub, Blockbench, Aseprite

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Design Process:

The theme of this jam was 'mode'. The first thing we did as a team was take to a Miro board to begin our brainstorming. Eventually we landed on the idea of a hybrid arcade style shoot-em-up and first person chaotic management game. The idea was you would have to swap between two gameplay modes to fight off enemies and repair / upgrade the ship.

We started off with some simple prototyping. I worked on the first person cockpit side of things while others worked on the arcade shooter aspects. From there we continued to playtest and refine the concept as we went. I used Blockbench, a simple 3D modeling program, to create the assets for the interior of the ship. We wanted the style of the ship to feel cohesive with the pixel art in the arcade shooter portion so we went with a simple blocky style.

Swapping between two different gameplay genres and control schemes within the same experience offered a unique challenge. In the end the game came together rather nicely and ended up doing quite well in the contest.

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