fledgling

Download Link - https://pingwoh.itch.io/fledgeling

I created this game at my first ever game jam, UT Game Jam 2019. The game follows a young bird who fell out of his nest and is desperately trying to return home, playing into the jam's theme of "Return." The player moves using the arrow keys and can use the space bar in order to jump up onto the branches to try to move up the tree. The player has to avoid angry squirrels and lumbering beetles as they work their way up the tree back to their nest. Note: this game is notoriously difficult (we didn't have time to balance it properly) however, it is beatable and people outside the dev team have completed it.

I had never participated in a game jam before, and had a limited amount of experience in Unity. Most of my team was in a similar position, with only our artist and sound designer having any experience in a game jam setting before. We relied heavily on tutorials, since the three programmers on the project had not worked on a 2D game in Unity before, which placed us on a more even playing field. I will admit, at the time of writing this log, it's been nearly 8 months since creating the game, so I cannot link the proper tutorials we used and give credit. It was also our teams first time working with Github, and we encountered so many problems while using it, and very quickly ended up abandoning the repository for the game.

The game is buggy, sometimes the beetles fly away and the player moves at a ridiculous speed. However, I am quite proud of this game, since all of us had very little experience with the engine. I had taken lead in the development of the game, and worked to try and solve any bugs that may appear as best I could. We may not have created an award winning game, but for a bunch of first timers who could hardly figure out how to add 2D box colliders to objects (I can't count the number of times we added a 3D collider instead) this is pretty impressive. We learned so much along the way, and I would take the knowledge and experience over a bug-free game any day. I can only hope you'll appreciate it as much as I do.