Can Bammy make it back to bed and overcome the morning sun to get to sleep by sunrise?
Year:
2026
Timeframe:
7 weeks
Tools:
Unreal Engine
Category:
Speedrun Platformer
Overview
Synopsis
Oh no! You've stayed up too late into the night and now the sun is about to rise! Play as Bammy the vampire bat and parkour your way through Victorian streets and roof-tops while the sun rises behind you. But careful that you don't run out of blood! You may want to take some "donations" along your way! How fast can you get home?
My Role
Bammy's Morning Stroll was a university game jam project. We had a team of 8 people, 5 artists and 3 developers. For this project I took the role of tech lead and programmer. I was responsible for managing the Github, making sure that all systems worked together correctly, implementing any and all 2D & VFX art assets as well as using blueprints to program Bammy's movement, animations, victims, blood meter, damage, as well as sourcing and implementing sound effects.
Bammy has a few movement options under his wings: Dash, double jump, and wall climbing. Because of the limited scope of these abilities, they are all within the player characters blueprint. You can see above the nodes used to accomplish this.
When ideating what mechanics and systems we wanted in the game the team discussed how these would fit in to the games core identity. We wanted the core experience of this game to feel like a vampire racing against the clock. To reinforce this idea we gave Bammy several movement options and pathways that allows players flexibility in how they move about the space. Bammy has access to a dash, double jump, and wall climbing. Because of the limited scope of these abilities, they are all within the player characters core blueprint. You can see above the nodes used to accomplish this.
To give the character a stronger identity as a vampire we implemented a blood meter that drains overtime so players must seek out victims to replenish it. Though this introduced a problem. Traditionally vampires stop and bite the necks of their victims but that would interrupt the fast paced game we were aiming for. To remedy this we came to the solution of using mechanics we already had in a new creative way. The dash also became the method that Bammy drains his victims' blood.
Once we understood how Bammy would get around, we knew that we needed some way for the player to recover the blood that is lost overtime as well as incorporate challenges for them to encounter and overcome. This is where the victims and lights would come in.
The victims would be strategically dotted around the map for the player to find and consume. However they need to be decerning, for some of the victims are not defenseless and wield a lantern or cross to repel Bammy should they try to consume them.
Whenever the player enters an invisible collision box that exists on each victim it begins to check if the player is dashing, and if they do, it will trigger a function that executes their death logic. Depending on the victim, this will recover or remove points from the players blood meter.
The light functions in a similar way however without checking if the player is dashing. If the player enters an area of light, they'll begin to quickly take damage until they leave its radius. One thing we wanted to ensure was that it was very obvious where the light started and ended. To accomplish this we used a mixture of 2D sprites and 3D emissive. These are also consistent across the game, allowing the player to quickly identify areas of danger.
