This is Interwoven. This 3D Unity adventure was created in 48 hours as a Game Jam project between a total of 5 people (2 main people with 3 others coming and helping temporarily). While my main roles here were leadership and programming, I also took on the role of level designer, coming up with layouts for the levels.

As with all Game Jams, this started as a single theme. The theme here was "Escape", and once we knew that we immediately started coming up with possible ideas. Our first helper joined us after a short time here, heard our main ideas and created a narrative for the game. Simply put, the story would be that the player is a soul trying to escape the 9 rings of hell while being chased by demons. Once this narrative had been created, the modeller of the team very quickly created a model for the player. It was this model that inspired the name of the game, "Interwoven".

Our first helper left us to the rest, and the two of us started coming up with the exact mechanics of how this would work. We agreed that mazes would fit the theme well, as is it often found that someone is trying to escape a maze or labyrinth. When trying to come up with something that would make the game unique, I came up with the idea of a rotating cube. This idea stuck with us and we worked on this concept.

The modeller supplied the assets for the level, including the ice, characters and special items to be placed. While he was doing this, I was designing the layout for the maze. This was going to be complex however it was done, and we decided that to make things easier on ourselves, the cube would only rotate on one axis, leaving two of the cubes faces competely untouched. This should have made it easier for the programming...

Programming most of the mechanics was easy enough. Enemy tracking was simple, the character movement was simple, the buttons were as well although we couldn't implement these until we had the sounds ready. However, there was one mechanic which had me stuck for a long time and shortened the time I could spend doing other parts of the game. The rotation of the cube would not fully work properly no matter what I did to it. Adding in a position loop mechanic (going off the top of the screen spawns the player at the bottom of the screen and vice versa) wasn't easy either. Between these two, I had a lot of work.

While I was stumped on these, my other team member was tasked with creating the music and designing the menu. Music is his main passion so he had no problems with this, but we did bring in our second helper for it. Together, those two created not only the main music for the game, but also the sound effects. Once these had been created, we could implement them into the game, and the game came alive. A good soundtrack makes a good game, but what these two created in the time they had was outstanding.

At last, I thought I had the rotation working properly. Everything was running smoothly, it was all perfect, and we had our level ready to go. Our final helper came in as both moral support and as a tester. As they had not seen any of the game so far, they had to work out how things worked by themselves. They managed this very efficiently, which proved to us that we had designed this well.

The final parts of the UI were implemented, some extras added to the menu very quickly, and then the time to present came. We were excited to show this game, but a lot of issues arose very quickly. When presenting, the cube rotation script crashed once again, and the cube returned to its ways of either not rotating fully, or rotating way too much. This was upsetting, especially since it seemed to work perfectly. However, we did not let this get us down for too long.

We finished presenting, took a break for a few days (working for 48 hours straight with little to no sleep is very exhausting), and then decided together that one day we would come back to this game and finish what we started. And we will. This game will be receiving updates and bug fixes, and Interwoven will become an adventure worth having.