(21/11/2024)

Link to play – – https://aviparmar.itch.io/gold-rush

Brief Description

This game presents two scenarios that directly relate to the core mechanic of balancing a platform. 

The first, inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s Gold  Rush (The Gold Rush 1925), is of two travellers trying to collect as much gold as possible without tipping a house on the edge of a cliff. Whoever can exit the house with the most amount of gold wins. 

The second, inspired by the short film ‘Balance’ (Balance 1989), is of two players on a platform with a mysterious chest in the middle. Whoever can stay in contact with the chest for the most amount of time wins the game.

Introduction

The prompt given for the week was ‘Small map, Large scale’. I took a somewhat iterative approach to this game, having made a simple game in the beginning, and then upgrading the game with additional features and nice-to-haves over time.

Pre-Production

It took me a long time to get a decent idea for this game because I kept thinking about what Jeff said the other week about focusing on ‘making a toy’, and just having a sort of basic game loop structure. And having learnt from my past mistakes, I wanted to first make a game that focuses on the mechanics first this time.

I also wanted to make something really simple and see if I could make more iterations/variations of the game, to see what works and what doesn’t through play testing.

I first started by looking at what I thought represented the theme of the project best, sports. Sports allow for a high degree of control in a small space, while keeping things fun. It was the perfect fit. Since I wanted it to be as simple as it could possibly be, I could make single player .

These game loops were fairly simple, but something that became increasingly unavoidable was a second player.

When I’m really desperate for ideas, I end up doing this thing where I draw anything and everything that comes to mind. I’ve found its a good exercise to strengthen your subconscious, something that Jesse Schell talks about quite a bit in his book as well.

So after drawing a bunch of shapes on sticky notes, for some reason they reminded me of this scene from Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush.

There’s these two travellers who were searching for gold in a snowy mountain cliff. They take shelter in this little brittle cabin, the snow picks up and the whole cabin is pushed to the side of the cliff.

I started to wonder about playing with the idea of balance, and combining it with sports, and thats how I finally came up with the idea for the game.

There is also a second level in this game, this one was a little bit rushed because I was running out of time. I still wanted to add it in because of what I had said about playing with multiple variations of a game idea and seeing what works.

The second idea was inspired by this short film called ‘Balance’ by Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein. It’s about a bunch of men on a circular platform. They’re all spread out to maintain the balance of this platform, but over time they lose their integrity over a mysterious box that randomly appears.

Production

I felt like the most appropriate platform to build this game on would be Unity. I vaguely understood what I wanted to do to make this work, and plus I needed the learning experience so I can build more games faster in Unity.

In my head, I knew I had to figure out the rigidbodies, player controller scripts and a score counter.

I learnt how to code the player controller script using Brackey’s first person controller tutorial videos¹, and learnt the score counter from a YouTube tutorial as well. If I ran into any problems, I’d usually just ask ChatGPT, or Nick if he was around.

I couldn’t playtest my game in class that week, so I asked one of my close friends from India to playtest it for me. It was really insightful to get his feedback because unlike the faster environment in class where everyone is moving from one game to the next, he could sit down and open it whenever he wanted to and really pay attention. He ended up recording a YouTube style video of him talking and playing my game at the same time, and I could keep rewatching it to figure out what was and wasn’t working.

Link to PlayTesting Feedback — https://youtu.be/-OruhPA6yBQ

Taking his feedback, I made the following changes to my game:

• Added Cinemachine follow camera to each player
• Added split screen
• Added power-up spawners instead of coded power-ups
• Added sound effects
• Fixed bug where some objects weren’t parented to house prefab
• Removed shooting mechanic (to keep it simple)
• Added Second variation of the game

Bibliography

1. ‘(5) FIRST PERSON MOVEMENT in Unity – FPS Controller – YouTube’. 2025. [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QajrabyTJc&t=176s [accessed 6 Jan 2025].
   
   Balance [Film]. 1989. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PADVHR-_wOs.
   
   The Gold Rush [Film]. 1925. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3AkR-uGA38. ↩︎