Gene Legacy is a 2D roguelike game made by a group of 6 developers in 48 hours for the Winter 2024 UQAC’s WonderJam.
It’s inspired by the game The Binding of Isaac.
The theme of the jam was “Genetics” and we got “Versus” and “Merge” as constraints.
You can play the game here!
The team
We were a team of 6 students, 5 learning video game development and 1 learning cybersecurity, all coming from UQAC, and it was our first game jam!
My role in the team was to be a game designer and programmer, level designer, and project manager.
The development
We used the first day to brainstorm in a Game Design Document (GDD) and come up with a game idea that would fit the theme and constraints. With our constraints, we decided to make a 2D roguelike game using Unity where you would merge genes to get new abilities and fight against monsters in an infinite set of rooms.
For our constraints, we decided to make a Player vs Monsters/Boss game where you would be able to merge genes to get new abilities in order to fight against stronger monsters.
For the theme (Genetics), we had the idea of hereditary genes that would be passed down to the next generation of players.
We didn’t have any artists in our team, so we used free assets from itch.io called Dungeon Tileset II by 0x72.
Sadly, because of IRL problems, we couldn’t finish the game like we wanted to. We had to cut some features and the game was a bit buggy. We also weren’t able to add the “Genetics” part of the game, so the game was kind of off-theme.
Even with all of that, we were still proud of what we accomplished in 48 hours and we had a lot of fun making the game!
The game
The game is a 2D roguelike game where you play as a character that has to fight against monsters in an infinite set of rooms.
Because we weren’t able to add the “Genetics”, the gene system wasn’t implemented in the game. We also neither had finished the game loop, so the game was more like a “run to the next room” where you would have to fight against monsters, even if they were implemented.
Looking back
I learned a lot during this jam, like how tilemaps work in Unity, how to make 2D hitboxes and how to fix bugs.
Unfortunately, the IRL problems weren’t expected, we didn’t have a backup plan for this because we scaled the project down to fit the 48 hours time frame with our team, knowing the experience we had.
Even if we didn’t finish the game like we wanted to, we were still proud of what we accomplished in 48 hours for our first game jam. We had a lot of fun making the game and we learned a lot from it.
It definitely was a great experience and I really want to do other game jams in the future!
Screenshots
Unfortunately, the original repository is in private, and I can’t make a public fork so I can only show you the screenshots of the game.
You can still play the game here to see it for yourself!
