Volcanic Panic is an arcade-style endless scrolling platformer. After an experiment goes wrong on Olympus Mons, you must escape your crumbling lab with your trusty jetpack, dodging rocks and lava along the way.
This was one of the first group projects that I worked on at Champlain College. Getting used to that team dynamic was confusing at first, but I settled into a routine of going to whoever needed the most help, and giving them a hand. With that attitude, our team’s relationship grew, in addition to my skillset in various disciplines. I had to figure out a lot of different aspects of Unity, everything from the UI systems to helping out with our platform generation system. After three weeks of hard work, we released our game on itch.io!
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I think our team did a great job deciding on a game that showcased our talents while still remaining in scope. We were able to create a fully complete arcade-style game in a 3 week time period.
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I wanted to help with my team in as many different ways as I could, so I wore a bunch of different hats during this project, bouncing around and helping people. This allowed me to learn a ton about a bunch of different disciplines in a short amount of time, and helping where I’m needed is something I still continue today.
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Out of all of the projects that I have worked on, I think this simple game loop might be my favorite. I am a big fan of arcade games, and our game loop of escape, dodge, try again fit the arcadey mold perfectly.
What I Did Right
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I really wanted this game to be the best that I could make it, which resulted in me crunching the last day. I worked for around 12 hours straight, and by the end of that I was super exhausted. I was proud of my work, but it taught me a valuable lesson about scheduling and better planning.
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While I think the game itself turned out really well, I think the way we presented and explained our thought process in class wasn’t that great. I don’t think we spoke that clearly, and we struggled creating a compelling pitch.
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We were trying to implement our generation system and jetpack into our game for such a long time that we barely spent any time trying to polish our game or fix any of the bugs that came up. Our game did not have anything egregious, but there were small polish things, like not having the lava rise until the player jumps, or adding some hit stop when the player blows up. Just small things like that really add so much energy into a game, and we failed to realize and implement that.
What I Did Wrong
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Trying to challenge ourselves, we wanted our game from the start to be endless, which required us to infinitely generate platforms. We got this feature to work, but the way that we spawned the platforms was far from ideal. It basically worked as a tree, having platforms branch out from preexisting ones, which resulted in exponential growth. Trying to tame random results is something that many games struggle with, and I’d be interested in trying to give random generation another shot.
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Lava sprouts and waves are in our game files, but we ran out of time to fully implement them in-engine. Returning to finally complete those missing features would be a great sense of closure.
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We wanted to mimic old-school arcade machines, and I think our aspect ratio helped sell that illusion. However, I think we could’ve pushed it further, because we didn’t touch the post-processing suite of tools that Unity offers. Even adding something as small as bloom or a vignette I think could add a lot more depth to the image.