Squeaky Team is an isometric puzzle platformer I developed alongside two artists at the Local RVA Game Jam running from Jan 31-Feb 2, 2025. When the jam theme was revealed to be “Bubbles,” my team opted to create a bubble-bath-oriented game where one player controls a gun-wielding rubber ducky that shoots bubbles, while the second controls a bar of soap that can ram into obstacles and bounce off bubbles, but cannot jump.
Coded all gameplay mechanics in Unity with C#, including player movement, bubble physics, checkpoint system, and on-rail camera.
Designed and whiteboxed the level puzzles to maximize player cooperation given the asymmetric playstyles of their characters.
One of the more interesting and fun aspects of this project was working with fellow game developers I had never interacted with before. The jam was hosted at the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), and as a graduated George Mason student mainly working alongside VCU students, it was incredibly fun to compare and contrast the experiences between universities, from the classes to the food courts to the campus as a whole. Meeting new people and hearing their stories while working side by side to create a fun, cooperative platformer over the course of three days was absolutely the highlight of the event.
A interesting coding challenge I encountered during this project was creating an isometric on-rails camera that follows two independent game characters. I utilized a lot of similar camera logic I learned from A Pig's Phobia in terms of moving along a rail relative to the player character's position, with the central change being that the camera instead follows the point between the two players. From there, it was a matter of using that position to create an alpha value between the start and end points on the rail and linearly interpolating the target position relative to that alpha.