Speed Hatcher – group project – lead programmer
Created over five days for a university game jam by a small team in an ode to the incredible theories of 19th century futurism.
Move back and forth across the screen to catch the falling eggs into your speed hatching machine and watch your score increase as each hatched chicken is yeeted into the fields beyond. Watch out for those rotten ones though!
disclaimer: we do not condone the idea of intensive breeding
Speed Hatcher was the product of a week long game jam in my 2nd year of University, for this game jam rather than a theme each group was given an image of a painting created in the 19th century that depicted what people thought various aspects of life would look like in the future.
Our painting titled: “Intensive Breeding” depicted a lady placing chicken eggs into a machine that seems to accelerate the development process from egg to baby chick, we chose to run with this depiction literally and create a game around birthing chickens through this machine as quickly as possible.
My role in the group was that of the lead programmer, I developed all of the main mechanics of the player as well as gameplay systems such as the timer and scoring system. What started out as a 2D game was eventually moved over to 3D with a fixed camera perspective, I first started on a simple spawning system for the eggs that would randomly instantiate an egg based off a random X offset with a fixed Y position.
After adding in poles to allow more Arcady randomness to the drop point of the eggs I also worked on the scoring system, assigning different egg types to different points, some eggs would award more points than normal eggs and some would take points away if they were rotten!
After implementing the player and some environmental models I got to work on making the machine throw out chickens when eggs fall inside, to do this I simply destroyed the egg object, added on a score representative of the type of egg that landed into the machine, instantiated a chicken model and upon start set it’s velocity and a rotation as well as spawn in a puff of smoke particle for added whoosh effect.
After placing in all final models I created the timer system and then programmed the large hand on the clock to rotate with the timer to give an in game quirky representation of how much time the player has left. I did some bug fixing and made it so any rotten eggs would not only take away from the player score but also stop them being able to collect eggs for a short period of time as the machine spews out yolk.
Connor Howard 