Catapulting in the Night

A small game my team worked on for a game jam hosted by my school. The theme of the jam was “Vision”, so I designed a game where the player can only see a small portion of the screen, and the rest is shrouded in darkness. The player mans a catapult from the lower left corner of the screen. Their goal is to defend themselves from zombies shuffling in from the darkness. In their arsenal, they have normal boulders as well as flaming boulders that allow them to illuminate the darkness. They also have access to a store that allows them to heal, expand their radius of light, and place down small barbed wire traps. The version of the game we landed on by the end of the jam turned out to be quite easy on the player, but in the original concept the player’s goal was to find a randomly generated path that allowed the zombies to move towards them more quickly so that they could prepare for the arrival of the boss who moves down the path. The game didn’t do the best in the jam, but in the gameplay sessions afterwards people told us they were enjoying playing our game for a long time.