SGA and Unity Game Jam

Serbian Games Association organized their second Game Jam, this time in association with Unity. Unlike other game jams this one didn’t have a specific theme, rather the goal was to use Unity’s new data-oriented approach to develop games on a larger scale. Games were supposed to have a huge number of objects moving around and interacting with each other.

My initial idea was to recycle a game mechanic from an older game, which I remember playing as a kid, called Beach Head. The premise was that the player is in a stranded place surrounded by enemies approaching from all sides.

After some more brainstorming we upgraded the initial idea and decided to recreate a battle scene from the Game of Thrones TV series, the one taking place on a frozen lake Beyond the Wall:

By making good use of the Unity’s new Entity Component System (ECS), Job System, and Burst Compiler we were able to simulate ice made of 10k pieces, which would crack under pressure and thicken over time, with 20k White Walkers rushing over it.

You could also burst flames, like a dragon would, to melt the ice and prevent enemies from reaching the island in the middle.

Happy to say that our project won the 1st prize even though there were some pretty cool projects in the competition as well!

The source is available on GitHub, hope it proves useful to someone even if it’s a messy game jam project developed in 24h 😉.

Many thanks to the organizers, other participants, my teammates Mladen, Aleksandar and Jovan, and especially guys from Unity for letting us play with their latest tech and helping us along the way!

This was an awesome experience, not sure if I’ll be using ECS in a project any time soon, but the Unity Pro license which came as a prize will definitely come in handy for my next project, which I’ll share more news about in the upcoming months.

Take care and see you at the next event! 😉