Alien Delivery Service

Controls:

Movement: WASD
Tractor Beam: Space
Grav-Aura: E (toggle)

How To Play:

Fill all delivery stations with packages retrieved from dispensers as fast as you can. Delivery stations will have a number on them identifying how many more packages it requires.
There are three different classifications of boxes. Each classification represents the box's weight. In order from lightest to heaviest they are: standard(medium in size), coin(smallest), and large(...which is the largest). Keep that in mind, these three box types all move/carry differently from one another.
Try to serparate light boxes from heavy ones. Standard boxes can be carried quite easily moving at full speed. Try your best to only have to move heavy boxes to nearby delivery stations.
Keep dropping boxes? Try slowing down a bit! Tap/feather the gas pedal!

Quick Postmortem:

Because I didn't keep a dev log, I figure I owe it to myself to write up a small postmortem for my FIRST game jam! The theme was announced at 11AM in my time zone on a Friday and I started brainstorming around noon. I couldn't shake the thought of mismatched foods, but I had no idea where I would go with that. I came to this idea and got to work just before 2PM. A few hours in I still only had character movement and the particle effects for the ship utilities (particle effects are too easy to get carried away with even if, like me, you're not good with them). I wasn't in love with where this was going. I started writing a "tractor beam" script. Trying to math, I quickly asked myself why not just use point effectors that are already built into Unity? Started out pretty good, although there were many iterations throughout the project. Boxes came next, then the dispensers which is where one of my ideas from the original design changed. I was going to create an object pool and recycle boxes back into the dispensers, but I didn't like that if there was a dispenser close to a particular group of delivery stations the player could essentially ignore the rest of the dispensers. I scrapped object pooling and decided to give each dispenser x boxes to have throughout the whole playthrough. Then I started to give more depth to the delivery stations by giving them custom widths that directly impacted how many boxes that delivery station would require (the wider/larger the station, the more deliveries it required). At the start of the game, the stations look at how many boxes will be in the game in total, then split them with each other. If there was 2 stations, station_1 @4 units wide and station_2 @2 units wide and there were 12 boxes total, station_1 would require 8 boxes and station_2 would require 4. The game was starting to come together, but that was it for Day 1. On Day 2 I polished some of the things I worked on Day 1. I also tried to get an on screen "cursor" to indicate nearby(but off camera) stations and dispensers. It was close, but there was one thing I couldn't figure out that prevented me from putting the UI component on the opposite side of the screen when the station/dispenser was in the other direction. Pretty crucial to know what direction it is in, but I'm no expert when it comes to Unity UI Components. I realized I was spending too much time on something that wasn't necessary when I still didn't have a win condition, title screen, sound effects, music, UI, etc. Next came all of that stuff. Decided that instead of a win condition, it would just be a race to finish. Deliver all of the required boxes as fast as you can!
What would I change? There is NO decoration to my world. I definitely wish I had spent some time on making the world more aesthetically pleasing, especially given all of Kenney's great assets. I also wish I could have some simple randomization to change the layout of the level a bit each time you play to add some replayability such as randomizing the widths of the delivery stations so they would require more/less boxes each play through, or placing the buildings in different orders.

KenneyJam:

Theme: Unlikely Combinations
Explanation: Aliens doing day-to-day delivery for humans. Most assets have been used as is, although there are a few in there that were rotated/scaled/recolored.

This game was made over the course of ~2 days for KenneyJam '19