This project was a fairly simple top down 2D created for the Extra Credits 2020 game jam. The jam theme was 'Take Care' and so our designer came up with the idea of a top down game in which the players take on the role of plague doctors and work together to explore a dark city and cure a deadly disease. The colour palette was chosen to fit in with a bonus challenge for the jam which required the use of an MS-DOS palette.

The game is not feature-complete, being our team's first game jam we overestimated the complexity of our design and exactly how much we could get done in 3 days with one programmer. By far the biggest challenge from a coding perspective was the line of sight system. The design required the player's vision to be constrained to increase the feeling of claustrophobia and give the game a small aspect of horror when combined with some of the other mechanics. This system works by casting a number of rays in a cone out from the front of the player. These rays stop at either a predetermined maximum length or when they hit a collider flagged as 'line of sight blocking'. From the end point of each ray the script then builds a 2D mesh which represents the player's cone of vision after taking into account the surrounding level. This mesh is then used as a clipping mask to selectively stop rendering a section of the 'fog of war', thus granting the player vision of that area.

The project was also my first attempt at a game with online multiplayer. I used the Unity plugin Photon Bolt to handle this, as it is both free and very quick to implement and test. When a player starts up the game, they are prompted to either host or join a room, which is handled by the Photon Bolt backend to either set up a server space or matchmake to an existing game.