Insanity was created for Dink Jam 2024. The team consisted of 6 people including myself. We created a 3D puzzle platformer in Unreal Engine
Dink Jam ran over 3 days giving us roughly 2 days worth of time to create a game before submission. As a result the planning time was reduced and a direction was decided quickly. I did not lead this project however did lead the programming / implementation of the game. In addition to this, being an experienced jammer I advised the lead on scope and timings to help them avoid the common pitfall of over scoping a 2 day jam. Development wise I worked on grabbing/placing, materials and implementation of the teleporting cubes when not visible.
Above you can see the logic applied to teleporting objects, this logic lets the object know when it is both in the players viewport and when it has direct line of site to the player. With just the left logic the cube would not move when obfuscated by an object as it would still be within the bounds of the viewport. The logic on the right seemed like the simplest way of doing it. It could be improved by increasing the number of checks bounds. A check could be done from each corner to get more consistency with teleportation from obfuscation.
Below you can see how the cube chose a location to teleport to, the faint red area shows possible locations for the cube to teleport to. We will call these areas "OTP's" (Object teleport points). OBT's also had the player viewport check methods as they inherited from the "Detect offscreen" class. This meant that when the cube wanted to teleport it could find a location that was not currently in view. This allowed us to create the illusion of the cube only moving when your back was turned.
An optimization I made for the asylum's style material walls was to get a height map from the artists so that I could use tessellation and displacement to create the bumpy look, the walls and floors are actually all flat planes with a displaced material to make them pillow like. The height map was also useful for ambient occlusion again selling the depth of the pillows
The material ended up being pretty good and I added onto it a fair bit once the main gameplay elements had been sorted
UV object scaling so the level designer can just place walls add the material and it will automatically be tiled correctly
Color variation macro variation based on designer specified parameters. The higher the "LineThreshold", the more of the splatter texture would be used.
Designer friendly material parameters
Insanity won best use of theme for Dink Jam 2024
