Pää Kolmantena Jalkana 2018

Pää Kolmantena Jalkana is a game that takes place on a faraway island in the ocean. You have one minute to collect your limbs, build your body, and transform into a statue for others to find. A rough translation for the title is “head as the third leg”, which could be interpreted as doing something as fast as you can.

GitHub Repository Playable demo

Theme: Gameplay lasts for 1 minute
Project duration: ~1.5 months
Team size: 4
Audio designers: 1
Graphics artists: 2
Programmers: 1
My task: Programming (99% of the code, limb attachment system, save/load, player controls, …)

Trailer

Description

Pää Kolmantena Jalkana is a game that takes place on a faraway island in the ocean. You have one minute to collect your limbs, build your body, and transform into a statue for others to find. A rough translation for the title is “head as the third leg”, which could be interpreted as doing something as fast as you can.

The creative restriction was to create a game where the complete gameplay experience lasts for only one minute. This is the second game that was made as a part of my Game Design studies.

Our initial idea was to create a very experimental game, where each one-minute gaming experience is recorded to create a ever-growing art piece. Each consecutive player could get clues about interesting areas from previous players, or perhaps find areas that no-one else has found before. This would have been further highlighted by having each 1-minute gameplay being visible as glowing footsteps that appear on the ground. However, the footsteps didn’t fit the other gameplay mechanics, so we scrapped the idea. The previous players can still help future players in this final version of the game, as the historical players are necessary to reach some of the areas in the map.

My tasks

I am not super happy with the end result, but it is okay-ish considering the very limited time and our team having only one programmer (me).

From the technical perspective, the interesting features of the game are persistent statues and attachable ragdoll limbs. All of the statues are saved (except on the web browser version), with the idea that this game acts as a collective art-piece. All the statues made by previous players are kept for the next players to see. The ragdoll limbs were interesting to create, as it is very hard to make them look natural, while still keeping the physics stable. To simplify both art and programming, the limbs themselves are static models without bendable joints.

The attachable limbs consists of the player Body, which has a BodyPartConnector for each limb (hands, feet and head). Upon collision, a BodyPart is attached to the closest available BodyPartConnector. Body parts differ from each other only visually, however, longer legs affect the height and speed of the player. They are also animated by simply rotating the BodyPartConnectors that the limbs are attached to, based on user input. As there are two joints: First between Body and Connector, second between Connector and BodyPart, the body parts are also affected by physics instead of being just statically animated.

Bodies are saved by serializing the position and rotation of each body part belonging to a body as a SerializableBodyPart, along with its ID. The ID is an int that is mapped to the different body part prefabs using the BodyPartRegistry. Based on the position, rotation and ID, each body of previous players can easily be loaded at start of the game.

I am not happy with the look of the attached limbs, as they are just dragged along and they keep clipping inside each other. This could maybe be fixed by dynamically adding a force to the limbs in an attempt to move them to a more natural position, while still allowing them to wiggle freely while the player does sudden movements.

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