Ascension²

Ascension² is the game my team and I have made for the Game Projects course at DAE. The team consisted of 3 Artists (Joren Arens, Lend Van Den Berge, Jan Hahn) and 2 Programmers (Jasper Caerels and I). I asked another friend of mine not associated with DAE to make the music for the game, thank you Menno Knuts!

The theme for the game was Arcade, so we decided to take a twist on one of the most well known classic arcade games: Tetris! All participating Game Projects were put as a game jam on itch.io and ranked, our game managed to win 4th place out of 31 contenders!

We wanted to bring back the typical arcade aspects such as fast paced fun gameplay, progressive difficulty, endless gameplay possibilities and the good old high-score table for the competitive gamers!

We decided to make the game in Unity Engine, it fits the style best. As programmers we divided our tasks to each tackle 1 big aspect of the game. Jasper mainly did the player character and everything involving it while I did the blocks and other world elements.

The blocks are the most important aspect of the game, forming randomized tetromino shapes and falling down on the player to create a completely dynamic environment. These shapes each exist out of multiple smaller squares, that can be individually shot by the player to clear the way upwards as they try to escape the rising lava. If they fall on top of you however, you will be squashed underneath it and die.

Because of this mechanic, many of these squares would be destroyed and created at runtime. To keep this optimised, we used an object pooling system with these squares inside of it. This object pooling was later also applied to the bullets.

If the player reaches certain heights, a row of blocks will spawn underneath him (as seen on the image above) to prevent these steep towers and give the falling blocks a new basis to start from.

Other than blocks that could fall on top of you, the player also has to look out for certain special blocks.

-Lasers coming down on the side of the screen that will destroy everything in it's path when it fires.
-Death blocks, signified by the red skull on it that will kill you instantly when you step on it.
-Portal blocks, that will teleport you to the corresponding portal block. This can be very beneficial but also dangerous if you teleport right under a normal block!
-Deteriorating normal blocks, where you can't stay on too long.

With all these negatives, we also have a very positive block: the boost block! This one will launch you up high into the sky and give you an advantage in ascending.

An important part of arcade games is endless play. So if you make it through the Hell and Styx stage, you enter Space, which will go on endlessly while spawning objects like planets, satellites and UFO's at randomly in the background.