B'loon Blast

Navigate and protect your balloons from aliens using only your guns!

It's one woman against aliens as they come down to earth to STEAL ALL THE MONEY. On the plus side, she has unlimited ammo and plot armor. On the other hand, the only vehicle she can afford after such insane purchases is a bundle of balloons. Maybe she won't be able to beat the invading aliens, but hell, she'll take down as many as she can before she's forced to blow up another three more balloons!

This game was developed in Unity within 48 hours and was a submission for the Game Maker's Toolkit jam. It was designed to fit the "Dual Purpose Design" theme. It ranked 56th out of 768 entries overall.

The dual purpose mechanic in this game is the player firing their guns to navigate their balloons while using the bullets to defeat aliens.

This was the first game I worked on as the sole programmer and it allowed me to learn how much I could create on my own within 48 hours and also to appreciate the benefits of having more programmers to work with. The game had a lot of features planned but had to be scoped down due to time constraints. Overall, it was fun to test my capabilities as the sole programmer.

This game is available to download at the bottom of this page.

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Role

Game Programmer

Contributions

Below are the details and my thoughts on my contributions to this project.

Programming

• Player movement system
• The player is hung on the balloons and is propelled by their guns to swing side to side.
• A hinge joint component on the balloons and attached the player onto it. I then applied force to the player to propel them in the opposite direction of their gun firing.
• This was the first time I used the hinge joint component in Unity.

• Player shooting system
• Bullets are spawned using an object pooling system due to the large number of bullets that are created during the game.

• High score system
• Score is calculated from how long the player survived, how much money they collected, and how many enemies they beat.
• The highest score is saved and can be viewed in the high score menu.

• Audio system
  • System was designed in a way that audio clips could be played wherever in the game.