A Fox’s Tail

A 48 hour GameJam created for a competition with the theme of “Animal Warfare”. You follow the footsteps of a fox who decides to leave his comfortable den to explore the dense forest outside, coming across obstacles and enemies along his travels.

The 2.5D platformer game was created using Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) with me as the sole programmer. In the time frame of 48 hours I managed to implement a fully functioning character that could double jump and crouch with a full range of blend animations. I also added a simple checkpoint system, burrow mechanic and a technique to keep the character base rotation parallel to the ground. We had hoped to add a lot more to the game but the time constraints were too much for all the work we wanted to complete.

This was my first GameJam and, as a result, getting to grips with the entire pipeline was challenging as well as in such a small time frame. Creating the fox rig for UE4 as well was difficult as we came into this without any knowledge of how this system would work from traditional VFX rigs. We did manage to get the fox animated and rigged for the engine but the workflow was flawed and a lot of time was wasted. I also realised the importance of source control for a games project and, during the game jam, created a Perforce server to ensure we didn’t have any file conflicts when working on the same project.