Global Game Jam 2022:
Quantum Field

Project Introduction

Quantum Field was a team project developed by 6 people (myself included) for Global Game Jam 2022. The theme for the jam was duality, so the team created a game that revolved around the principle of wave-particle duality. The idea for the game was originally a joke from one of the team members, but it ended up being the best idea we made up, so we stuck with it.

The final form of the jam project focuses on the main mechanic of things behaving differently when not being observed by the player. For the jam, the mechanic affected specific objects in the scene causing them to either disappear and become intangible or the opposite would occur for others. From this mechanic, we developed a few puzzle-based levels around it and created the demo just in time for the end using model asset packs from the unity asset store.

My Role

My role in this jam was to float around the team and help with any programming tasks that were important to the game; however, my main areas of focus were polishing the game with visuals and audio.

I chose to dive into these areas because I had very little experience in post-processing and absolutely no experience in game audio production and wanted to dip my toes in the water and push myself far outside of my comfort zone and start developing new skill sets that would become useful to me in future projects

Development Process

As previously mentioned, the project was based around the idea of wave-particle duality and things behaving differently when not being observed. So the first thing that the team tackled was planning out the main observation mechanic and how it will be achieved, as well as potential pitfalls to look out for, then split up into different sections that would develop different parts of the project (Core Mechanics, Level Design, Minor Mechanics, Post-Processing, Audio, etc...).

Given my team roles, I started work on some minor mechanics for the puzzle aspects of the game, with my main contribution being the implementation of a functional button and its animation.

After developing the button functionality and animation, I moved on to the post-processing volumes and main menu layout to make the game stand out visually. The game feel we were aiming for was a dark, dimly lit laboratory with sinister overtones, so I used the tone mapping and colour adjustments to create dark, high contrast visuals while still retaining and accentuating the accent colours that stand out in the environments. I wanted to make those accent colours pop so I added a strong bloom effect with lens dirt to push a neon, sci-fi feel to the levels.

Once finished with post-processing effects and the menu layout, I moved to learn about game audio production and some basic music theory to get me by for the jam. This gave me a great opportunity to look into an area that I had never before worked in and also allowed me to learn some new software for making the audio, namely Waveform 11.