OVERVIEW

Where does your shadow go when the sun sets and there isn’t any light to cast them? Why, they all go to the bar, of course! Trouble is, only special tinctures can be consumed by these ethereal creatures. It is your job as an Alchemist to brew these special drinks for your “after hours” customers.

After Hours was made during the Pirate Software Game Jam 15, which had two themes this year: Shadows and Alchemy. In this cooking-inspired game, you have to constantly swap between menus to check the received orders, find the recipe, gather ingredients, and then brew before handing it to customers! Speed is key here, as you only have two minutes to finish the orders, and each level adds more and more customers to your list.

Project Goals

Build a game in 2 weeks using the themes Shadows and Alchemy
Program the game alongside a second programmer using careful communication and coordination
Contribute ideas and feedback to the team when needed

PRODUCTION

The crappy MS Paint drawing that started it all.

First iteration on the front-facing screen. I guess we’re just doing MS Paint every time.

Second iteration on the dropdown for taking orders.

Final version of the bar. It’s a 3D room with 2D sprites for all the characters and interactable objects. Very proud of the style.

Final version of the main menu. I had a lot of fun placing the credits in the world. The camera is in the center and slowly rotates around. I loved making all the objects float up and down ever so slightly. Some of my favorite menu work so far.

GALLERY

BLOG

This game jam was my first jam as a programmer, and I learned a lot. I had the help of another programmer who was used to the format of game jams, so I was able to learn a lot really basic stuff I missed out on learning, like how to use GitHub, or actually resolve conflicts between branches, instead of storing it all on one branch and hoping for the best. Yeah, as if I didn’t already learn my lesson in general with the death of Menu Mania, turns out there’s even more stuff I didn’t know. I was also able to learn how to use Navmesh for basic AI navigation, alongside storing data such as location and customer orders. It was so bad for so long, I think AI was the feature that took me longest out of the jam. It was something like 4 days out of 14 days for the jam.

Alongside programming core mechanics, I also got to flex my UI muscles in this project, as a grand majority of the code was focused around UI components like world-space canvases, buttons, and layout groups. What I gained from my co-programmer in code knowledge, I gave him my UI knowledge. Considering our game was going for 2.5D style, I was a very valuable asset to our team. As was everybody else, but it felt good to feel good about my contribution.

One of the highlights of the project for me was the game’s main menu. It is a 3D room with a camera in the orthographic perspective slowly spinning around the room. Now, I don’t know exactly how orthographic works, but it made everything very cohesive. I filled the room with as many of the 3D and 2D assets we had as I could, so that they could be appreciated better. I made everything float up and down slightly to tell the player they were in a magical place, and I made the credits as unobtrusive as possible by using world-space canvases to stick our names to the walls.

As my most recent project (today is 9/4/24), After Hours was a blast to make and I learned so much more than I thought I could in two weeks.