The Collapse was created for the AICASF 2014 game jam. This was a 24 hour event made up of alumni from 3 different Art Institute of California schools, hosted at the San Francisco campus. The theme was ‘Apocalypse’.
Our game takes place on a large space station platform that is slowly collapsing and falling into a glowing pit. The player has very limited visibility, the only light coming from the player, a helper drone, and collapsed floor tiles. The closer to a tile a player is, the faster it will break and fall. There are enemy security cannons that will shoot at the player, destroying any tiles hit. Players have an energy gun that can destroy tiles and cannons. The goal is to find your spaceship parts and return to your ship so you can escape.
Our team had two programmers and three artists. My main duties were creating the collapsing floor mechanic and the enemy cannon behavior, along with miscellaneous smaller tasks like switching levels and the item pickup system.
The game overall could use a polishing pass, but I’m happy with how my floor collapsing mechanic came out in particular. I used a heatmap-style approach for this- all tiles within range of the player will begin breaking, and will break faster the closer the player is.
Since there were potentially thousands of tiles per level, I focused heavily on keeping things as efficient as possible to avoid frame drops. Tiles find and register with their neighbors at the beginning of the level using raycasts, leaving the artists free to change up the levels without touching any scripts. A physics trigger area around the player is used to calculate tile breaking.
When a tile collapses, it falls into the pit, activates a light to produce the glowing pit effect, and tells its neighboring tiles to run a second lighting check. If a collapsed tile runs this check and sees all surrounding tiles are collapsed, it disables its own light to keep the number of active lights in the scene to a minimum. You can see the heatmap working in the image to the right, represented as red boxes that increase in size, as well as red lines signifying a neighbor connection.
You can try out the game here. Controls are WASD to move, LMB to shoot, and RMB to move your helper robot. Some text dialogues pop up quickly, so move slowly at first to make sure you don’t them. There was never a ‘win’ state implemented, so if you manage to get through the two levels and return to the spaceship in the starting area, you’ve beaten it.