UE4 Winter Jam 2019: Coup d'Amour

After having to miss the fall UE4 jam last year, we were determined to make something happen in the winter jam. School schedules still managed to get in the way, but in the end we found time for a fun little project.

I tend to wear a lot of hats for game jams; I primarily did gameplay programming, but also some UI stuff, sound, particles, and general tech art stuff. With school getting in the way I really only got to spend 3ish days out of the 5.

Andrew did sound and music, as usual, which turned out really well. He really only had the weekend (two days), and then had to take off back home. We had an emergency in the last 24 hours with music, and he had to compose something really fast using GarageBand on a  2011 iMac, which was quite impressive.

Barak did his usual amount of art, which is to say, "all of it". He also only had 2 or 3 days, because on top of school, he had to go attend a wedding in the middle of it all.

We also got Will in for this one. He did a lot of UI design and programming, and also did some great work with the trailer and submission. The trailer is mostly limited by my ability to supply him footage near the deadline. Like the rest of us, he only had around 3 days to pitch in.

The theme this time around was `All's Fair in Love and War`, and we decided to submit something in the `Friends and Foes` category (a shared-screen multiplayer game). Will came up with the game's name; It's a play on coup de' grâce, which is "killing blow" or "blow of mercy" in French. Coup d'Amour is "blow of love", which is fun considering the jam's theme (He also checked it with a native French speaker to make sure the wordplay is valid, so hopefully we aren't making fools of ourselves there).

So there you have it. Coup d'Amour is a local multiplayer game for four players:

It's a twin-stick shooter, and you all play on the same screen. The rules are pretty simple:

• You play in teams of two, as king and queen. You're attached to each other with a rope (it's a metaphor for your love, or something).
• To win, use your crossbow to sever the other team's rope.
• There are two colors of crossbow bolts; You shoot one, your teammate shoots the other.
• You have a shield, but it only blocks one color. Use it to protect your partner, and hopefully they'll protect you too.
• Your shield will break if it takes too much damage. That wouldn't be good.
• Blocking damage makes your teammate's shots more powerful. If you charge them up enough, they could break right through an enemy shield.
• You can shield bash the enemy if they get too close. This costs some shield durability, but will stun your enemy.
• Grab powerups to give you a shield-ignoring fireball, or regenerate your own shield's durability.

These rules make for a pretty fun kind of rock/paper/scissors style gameplay. You want to block shots to charge up your partner, but not so many shots that you lose your own shield. To win, you can out-play, out-smart, or just out-shoot the enemy team. Since you're attached to your partner though, you'll have to coordinate where and when you move or attack. Play too timidly, and you'll find yourself with a broken shield. Too aggressively, and the enemy will do too much damage for you to block.

Here's a quick video to give you a sense of the gameplay, and I apologize that it has no sound (we were in a rush near the deadline, as you might imagine):

We had a ton of fun working on the project - the logic is pretty complex, with a lot of moving parts, and all of the art save for some sounds was done by hand (although the far-off camera angle doesn't really do it justice, sorry Barak).

If you'd like to download and play it, and you have four gamepads and a Windows computer, you can check it out on my Itch.io page here. Unfortunately it does require four gamepads for you to get past the lobby screen, a fact which I fear may have made it difficult to judge for the jam.

UE4 Summer Jam 2018: Albina (VR Category Winner!)

A while back we did an informal, air-quotes "game jam" in my basement. It went well, and we had a ton of fun, so we decided to enter a "real" jam over the summer. We picked the UE4 Summer Jam, since we happen to be using UE4 anyway. The theme was `Well that escalated quickly`, and what's amazing to me is that we (and by we I mean Barak) had the core game idea an hour before the theme announcement. We were sitting around, setting up PCs and brainstorming random directions to go, and Barak pitched this great idea for a high pressure room-escape game. You play as one of the dogs sent in to space by the Soviet Union, trying to keep your spaceship from falling apart while you simultaneously try to open the hatch and escape.

We all loved the idea, but we sort of dismissed it. It was super specific, so we thought it was unlikely to fit the theme; A real shame, since it was a cool concept.

The announcement came though, and we all burst out laughing. We tried to sit and workshop some other ideas, but we knew pretty quickly which one was the winner, and we got to work. The game is called Albina, and other than some major packaging bugs in the last 8 hours of the jam, I'm pretty proud of it:

The setup is this: You play as Albina, the soon-to-be second dog in space. When the first (Laika) doesn't return, you realize it's a one way trip. Now you have to get the parachute and escape the capsule before it leaves the atmosphere.

In essence, it's an escape room, with a bunch of connected puzzles that you can complete in any order. You could work backwards from the goal, and try to figure out what you would need to open the hatch (You see it's connected to a keypad, but the keypad doesn't have power). Alternatively, you could just start using things that you find (you've got a hammer, now what objects are hammer-able?).

The twist on the escape room genre is that as you solve puzzles, things start going wrong. The radiator springs a leak, or the power cuts off, and you must solve those problems before they kill you. As you continue, the number of problems... well it escalates. There's a lot of escalation in fact; The rocket escalates, your heart rate escalates, the number of concurrent alarm sounds escalates, and the list goes on.

Here's the video we submitted as part of the jam. It's not the most polished, for obvious reasons, but it shows a bit of the gameplay:



Like most of them, this was a super fun project! As our first "real" game jam, we made a lot of mistakes, most of which didn't reveal themselves until the final day. We entered the final stretch only to find that 8+ hours of debugging the "Simon Says" logic still hadn't fixed it, packaging the game broke all UI functionality, and sometimes the game would just kill you for no reason. We almost couldn't even submit the game, because of two very strange problems in the packaged build:

1. We somehow corrupted a couple of pretty important blueprint assets (primarily the GameState blueprint). This was totally our fault, because in our *incredible* wisdom, we didn't set up proper source control. Instead, we shuffled project files around a Google Drive folder, and manually ran the asset migration tool to move blueprints around. I don't recommend this strategy, just FYI. Whatever the problem was, it caused some packaging errors related to paths that didn't get normalized, and I had to spend a couple of hours just trying to get UE4 to output an executable. Oops.
2.  There are some quirks with UE4's Widget Interaction Component, which is generally the way to handle menus in VR - you use a laser pointer. I personally prefer to use physical buttons and levers instead, when possible, but in a game jam setting there isn't always time for that. For some reason in the packaged build, the enable/disable rules for widget components weren't being respected, so you couldn't actually press any of the menu buttons. After 4 or 5 hours of trying to fix this, we settled on the clean and extremely non-hacky solution of teleporting all the menus that weren't interactable a mile underground until the player needed to see them. Hey, if it works it works.

Because of these slowdowns, we just had to strip some things out. I expected to be leaving features unimplemented, but in this case it hurt even more because we had to cut features that were already implemented. We had to scrap the seated mode, pause menu, and victory/loss UI elements, which is just a shame. Technically to beat the game you don't even need the parachute, because the "you jumped out without a chute" UI had to be cut. Oh and there's only 4 rounds of Simon Says instead of 5 (it's complicated).

Regardless, we're pretty proud of the game. The core logic, and all of the little polish elements really came together in the end, and it all makes for a ton of chaotic fun. If you'd like to play it, you'll need a VR capable Windows machine, and you can check it out on my Itch.io page.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention - the game won the VR/AR category, which totally blew us away! The hurricane here in NC delayed the results a bit, so we almost forgot to even check! I guess it's not exactly an Oscar, especially since there were only around 15 VR submissions, but for a first entry I'm really pleased. We cheered for a bit after getting the results, and then sort of said "Huh, yeah, so I guess we just uh, go back to doing homework now". And then that's what we did.