The Slamma is an arcade-y prison breakout game based on a super short prototype I made for a five-hour game jam. The original jam took place in March of 2022. I came back to the project every once in a while and worked on completing it throughout 2022. Then I migrated to a new computer in October, and, solely because I was too lazy to re-enter my GitHub credentials and back up my work, lost a chunk of progress permanently when I copied and deleted the wrong folder (lesson learned forever). I left the project alone for a while but eventually managed to restore most of what I lost - in addition to a bunch of new things. The game is mostly functional, but for some reason I never actually ended up releasing it. I’d still like to!
The original prototype
This jam had a pretty open-ended theme. Everyone participating posted a bunch of gifs in a discord channel, then chose one to use as inspiration for their game. Here’s the one I picked.
Despite knowing that I would only have 5 hours to work on this thing, I still scope-crept the hell out of it during the brainstorming phase. The original pitch included the following:
- Kill enemies in one hit in a door-based combat system (drawing heavily from Hotline Miami)
- Rip doors off their hinges and pummel enemies
- Procedurally-generated maps that pull from a pool of rooms
Trying to squeeze randomly generated maps into the process on top of everything was a crazy idea, but I still managed to deliver well enough on the first two points.
Here’s a timelapse video showing the whole development process.
And here’s a gif showing how it looked at the end of the jam! The main grabbing and slamming mechanics here are almost identical to the ones seen in the final version of the game.
Updating and refining the game
First and foremost, I really wanted to deliver on the random level generation idea that I proposed in the original pitch. The method I used for achieving this was a little primitive, but worked well for my purposes:
- Each room can have up to 1 entrance on each compass direction (North South East West)
- When kicking a door open, a room with a connecting door opposite the direction you’re moving towards is instantiated.
- Only two rooms are ever loaded at a time. If the door to a third room is opened, the oldest open door shuts and its level is removed. This also meant that backtracking would spawn in different random rooms upon re-opening doors, which I felt added to the maze-like nature of the prison.
And for what it’s worth, I felt like it worked pretty well! At the end of the day, it all boils down to having enough room prefabs in the room pool to avoid repetition. As soon as players begin to notice the same room appearing too often, the illusion dies.
There were also a few features I added to the game to try and give it a bit more oomph without requiring too much effort on my end. I added a timer and a score meter, the latter of which also became tied to the main goal of the game: Reach 5,000 points and the exit door has a chance of appearing as you navigate the prison.
I also added a second enemy type in the form of security guards, who shoot at you from a distance. You can also free prisoners from their cells and they’ll make a beeline towards any guards they see instead of focusing on taking you out.
A couple tracks off my newest album also got used in the game.
The game ends once you reach the exit, with the timer stopping as soon as you touch your pal’s car. My buddy Klester made the textures for it - the only detailed model in the game! Unfortunately I lost the blender file during the progress wipe I mentioned earlier. It wouldn’t be too hard to recreate, though.
The game is basically done, but needs more levels to really shine. Losing the most recent version of the game demotivated me for a while. I’m tempted to just release it as-is, because virtually everything works right now.