I have enjoyed another game jam!

This time it was the swedish videogame news site Frag Zone that set up FZ Game Jam 2021. The time is right because it’s cold and dark outside these months. So a lot of my spare time is at the computer.

The jam time was set to a month, ending at 16th of November. I joined the jam 1 week late when randomly visiting the site. There was money to win, so why not!?

I’ve wanted to try out MonoGame for a long time and thought this could be the right time. I don’t feel there’s a big difference in C# and Java anyway.

I’ve also thinking about trying to make a rail shooter for a while too. As most of my games, I try to recreate another game I already know about and then add or change things as I see fit. This time that game was Star Fox for the SNES in holy 256*224 resolution.

I didn’t use MonoGame the “Game component way”. I usually stick to entities and try to use interface’s only when needed. It feels like I have more control of the workflow and game that way, especially update/render order…

Anyway the game turned out ALMOST as I wanted it. Working with MonoGame, making calculations using Vectors and Matrices is easier than in LibGDX. One thing I was disappointed with was that MonoGame does not have an implemented way of reading animations from a 3D model.

What I used for this project:

  • C# with MonoGame game framework and of course Rider as IDE.
  • Blender for low poly 3D models.
  • Aseprite for pixel textures.
  • Git for version control.

Few mistakes and things I didn’t have time to implement:

  • MonoGame does not export to WebGL. Why is this not a thing?
  • I didn’t use shaders for the model as “your supposed to” but it works and can always be updated in a more efficient way later by anyone.
  • No end boss. =(
  • More enemies.
  • Velocity based movement.

The final result of the game’s votes will be 1st of December. It would be nice to win!

Download game from Itch

Download sourcecode from Github

 

Development GIF’s