Birds Of War

Lead Programmer, Jump Jet Games

Imperial War Museum Game Jam @ Abertay 2019

The Imperial War Museum visited Abertay with a Game Jam with the theme of “Cold War” for a new exhibit they were running. The game had to be related specifically to the American planes of that era, have an 80s/90s vibe to it, and be accessible to kids. I worked alongside Niamh Loughran (Designer/Production) [LinkedIn Link] and Ross Stewart (Design/Production) [LinkedIn Link]

The game we developed saw the player send out appropriate response aircraft to meet incoming attackers. A radar system scans the skies around the play area, and when an enemy is spotted the player must “tag” the aircraft to keep it on the screen. They can then send out the relevant aircraft to meet this threat (eg fighter to destroy a bomber).

Developed within Unity and using the Unity Collaborate features, I developed a system for visual radar, by which a simple line collider that rotated radially around the centre. When in contact with incoming planes, the planes would light up, only to fade back into darkness if not tagged by the player in time.

Features Implemented:

Radar system

I implemented a radar system to detect incoming planes, highlighting them for a short moment before they faded back to invisibility. This was done with two parts. Once the plane collided with the radar gameobject, the planes mesh renderer material was set to a given colour. Then a coroutine was called to gradually fade out this colour (gradually reducing the alpha) by lerping the current colour and the current colour minus its alpha.

Once the player had used the controls to “tag” an enemy, this would switch the is_Detected bool to true, and the fade coroutine would no longer run, leaving the enemy plane permanently visible.