Game Engine Jam

Grade

Worth 12% of final grade.

Deadlines

• Section A (Tuesdays): Sunday, 17 March 2024
• Section B (Thursdays): Tuesday, 24 March 2024

If there is a serious need for an extension, contact your instructor at least 3 days before the deadline.

Brief

Using Phaser 3 (and any other libraries you wish), create a prototype that puts your own twist on what a 2D game engine is capable of.

Your prototype should explore a specific experience you’re interested in evoking or questioning, with the majority of your efforts going into this exploration rather than polishing the prototype or adding content. Three examples:

• Abstraction. Game engines are by their nature often focused on creating physical, realism-based experiences. Could you make a game that goes the other way and uses those tools to make an abstract experience? Strange animations. Weird lighting effects.
• Musical Platformer. Could the experience of a basic platformer be used as a kind of instrument for making music? What are the actions that could be used? Jumps as drums? Collectables as synthesizer tracks? Enemies as drones based on proximity?
• Glitchhunting. Could you find a way to make glitches in a game’s implementation (out of bounds areas, buggy jump physics) the main thing the player is looking for. Needing to exploit these “glitches” (they would obviously need to be planned!) to actually win or to discover secrets?

Make sure to explore a well-defined idea in your prototype. It could be funny, scary, emo, weird, or something else. Just make sure it’s at least a little surprising, we’re aiming for novelty here. Please do not make a traditional 2D platformer.

When coming up with your idea(s), start with the possibilities present in Phaser 3 (sprites, physics, movement, animation, tilemaps, …) and go from there. Try not to imagine a fantasy project and then to figure out how to make it. Start with the technical reality and turn it into something interesting.

Please follow the Style Guide.

Technical details

Feel free to create a repository only for this project, or to work in a subfolder of your cart263 repository. A dedicated repository is more in line with real life developers, but either is fine.

Examples

• CART263 Game Engine Examples
• Phaser 3 Examples
• Phaser 3 Tutorials

Inspiration

• VVVVVV. A platformer where you can’t jump. As a speedrun experience? As a permadeath speedrun experience?
• Inside. Big mood.
• Problem Attic. Emotional, existential platforming.
• Artot. As in, you don’t have to make a platformer with it.
• The Artist Is Present. You really don’t.
• Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment. I swear.
• … feel free to suggest more to the instructor to add them here.

Submission

Submit a link to your running prototype and a link to the project folder in your repository on GitHub on Moodle. Please check your runing prototype actually runs online and not just locally.

Evaluation criteria

See the grading rubric associated with this assignment on the Moodle.