Winter Jam 2019 - Amaze & Ablaze

Epic games hosted there annual winter jam, for this game jam I teamed up with Lee Stockton who went into a generalist role and help with level design. We also had Robyn Murphy, Cat Wiltshire and Laura Flinders join the team and they worked on the art style and models for the game jam entry. I undertook the role of game designer / level designer for this game jam.

You can download Amaze & Ablaze here

The theme for the jam was all’s fair in love and war and the team decided that we should add a multiplayer feature to the game so we could enter the special category friends and foes – a shared screen multiplayer game.

We had a lot of ideas floating around for this game jam but the one everyone like was having a maze that you could control and move a ball around avoid war style traps and collect love coins to advance you further into the maze castle. With this we made a multiplier version where one user could control up and down and the other user could control left and right.

For the game mechanics the initial idea was the small plastic maze puzzle as you had as a kid and you could move them around to the move the ball around. To achieve this effect in the game engine I had to use one pawn class and an actor. The pawn class has all the controls into to move the maze around, I set up custom inputs and used the axis value to add to the world location of the actor. This was clamp so that the actor could only move 5 degrees in a positive / negative value, as the axis value works on -1 to 1, to control the speed I change the scale of the axis value to slow it down.

In the actor this is where the mesh of the maze goes, this is what the player moves when they use the controls in the pawn. Then it just  matter of placing a ball with physics simulated on it and it moves around.

---

To generate the maze, I set up a blueprint that would generate walls, floor tiles and the maze walls. To generate the maze it uses a recursive backtrack algorithm to generate paths combining this with mesh instances to help performance and a random stream to generate randomness.

Once the maze was generating for a base layout, it was just a matter of creating simple traps, we made 6 different types of traps. A simple spike trap that was animated in Maya and had a collision box enable and disable when the spikes we out. Trap door that if the player rolled into respawned the player, a bumper that knocked the player back via impulse, a trap that inverts controls and a cannon that fires bombs at the player either respawning them or knocking them back.
To add more to the maze, I make a coin pick up that pulses after the player goes over them as well as a large heart that adds a large amount. These coins can be used to unlock skins in the main menu.

Once all the mechanics where create it was about creating different sizes of mazes and added the traps, coin pickups, models, materials and particle effects to make the game polished.

Below is a video of the single player playthrough

---

You can download Amaze & Ablaze here