Sand&Rum

Sand&Rum is a top-down twin-stick arcade game developed using Unity during the "Group Project" course at DAE by Gilles Styns, Diego Torres, Yuna Othmer, Seppe WIllems and me.

Work

  • Movement. One of the challenges was to make the ship glide in a satisfying way while providing enough mobility for combat. So I made the angular speed adjustable and allowed the player to do dashes.

Debug view of early movement logic.

Testing the dashing.

  • AI was rather easy to implement thanks to the simplicity of the design we had. Unity provided all the necessary tools to implement that. Interesting fact: the bots don't just randomly spawn on the map, they spawn and despawn on a certain distance from the player, that's how the game always feels lively.

Some bot-ships drifting around.

  • Shooting was a lot of fun to implement. I made the cannons on the ship chargeable (Serious Sam style), so the players had to carry the physics of the cannonballs in mind.

Testing the shooting.

  • The gameplay rules were tricky to come up with for such a genre. However, to spice up the gameplay and give the player some sense of progression, I implemented a randomized upgrade system for the ship which affects: health, stamina/power/energy, maneuverability, speed, damage per and amount of cannons.

A ship with max amount of cannons.

Results

Sand&Rum was my first serious group experience.
It taught me a lot about the importance of working in a team and motivating your teammates. We did have some conflicts which took some time to be resolved.
I think we could have gone a little more experimental, but the point was not to make something super innovative, but something of good quality.