Sandstormer

Small game made for the Make-A-Thing September 2017 jam. The prompt words were staccato, prolong, and mass.

I wanted to make a game where you had projectiles flying at you too-fast and you use a time slow move to make them avoidable. Still a game about reflexes, but in when you choose to start reacting more so than in the reaction itself I guess. I realised in my head when I was picturing the projectiles firing, I was picturing them doing so at the tune of Sandstorm by Darude. So I, uh,  made this.

Dodge projectiles for the length of the song. Use your bullet shield to slow down projectiles to give you a chance to get out of the way. Collect batteries to recharge your shield.

All the projectiles are generated by a terrible midi version of the song, using Unity's Spectrum Analyser function (huge thanks to Steve Halliwell for showing me how to do this. I had to get the right tracks to isolate the sounds I wanted, use these sounds to generate the events that spawn the missiles, then put the audiosource of those sounds through a Mixer so I could then mute them and instead just play the full midi track. Originally I wanted to play the proper version of the song, but it didn't line up perfectly with any of the midis I found so we get this.

I only worked on this game over a 50 hour period and I was pretty sick to death of it pretty soon after I started. Mostly thanks to hearing the song so much! But I learned a whole lot about Unity and audio that I'm real excited to play around with on a less trash project in the future. 

Update 1.1: Added a quick hacky new mechanic where if you stay still for over ten seconds you start to get bigger. This is a cheap solution to the fact there are places on the map that you can just stay still and avoid all projectiles.

Controls:

Move - mouse

Shield - left click or z

Restart - r

Quit - esc

As usual, Windows version not yet tested.

(In 2017 I am challenging myself to make 50 little videogames to get more familiar with the tools. I make no guarantee that any of the games are good, but that's not really the point. This is game #26 of 50.)