Deep Dive
In Garden Slayer, your goal is to get to the end of the level to destroy the Statue of Corruption to free the forest.
Hold the right mouse button to rotate the seesaw, and press left mouse to shoot it. Holding it (and shooting!) overheats a little the seesaw launcher, so spamming is not the best option (it is, due to the short recovery animation).
There are three different enemies going for you: The potato is the basic soldier, the carrot is extra-fast, and the turnip is the tank (and the final boss).
Garden Slayer was made in under 48 hours for the 2023 edition of the Global Game Jam, specifically the ArtFX edition of it.
Roots of the Project
The Global Game Jam 2023 theme was “Roots”, and after some brainstorming we had two major ideas to vote for:
> A journey upstream on a raft, going around and under tall-rooted mangrove-like trees, potentially representing Yggdrasil.
> Going up a hill with a seesaw launcher, killing zombie stem tubers (root-like vegetables like potatoes and carrots) by the dozen.
Wanting something more high-action since part of the team’s last Game Jam game was very slow-paced and atmospheric, we went for the second option.
Video of the game in action.
To prevent shooting 24/7 without thinking being the best strategy, we quickly devised an overheat system. You first start rotating the blade and then shoot. Keeping it rotating for too long (or shooting too much) will overheat and force a cooldown period.
Fun fact!
The idea of slicing in half a big “Corruption Statue” only came to us when one of our artists had enough time to sculpt the statue; and we found it so cool that it was quickly implemented in the game as the endgame goal, after beating the boss.
Rotational Slice and Dice
The behavior of the seesaws were inspired by the “Chopper” in Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando (or R&C 2 for us Europeans). It’s a shuriken-launcher of some sorts where projectiles auto-aim on enemies after bounces.
When leaving the seesaw launcher, each projectile goes forward at a fast speed with some slight aim-assist.
But when touching an enemy, it bounces away and detects nearby targets before looping back to hit them with heavy auto-aim and slow speed to not get too far.
The seesaws bouncing around in our testing world. I could have shown side-by-side footage of Ratchet & Clank 2’s Chopper as reference, but I don’t have the rights!
Fun fact!
Due to lack of time on the programming side, and not knowing well how collisions and physics worked in Unreal Engine at the time (this was the second time we worked with Unreal Engine), all projectiles go through walls!
This is because Unreal Engine only does collision checks on the Root (pun intended) Component of each Blueprints. But not knowing that, we set up the colliders as child components; so no matter what we did, we never could have made it work with this workflow!