Great Minigames – Tobias Makes Games

Ritual Breaker: A GGJ Game For Four Druids And Two Traitors

Tobias Wehrum — Sat, 12 Mar 2016 22:30:13 +0000

It’s been a few years since the GGJ whose theme was “deception” – a theme that we, back then, utterly and completely ignored. The only way to make up for that (I assume) is to use the theme in another GGJ! So here, after 6 years, my honor as a jammer is finally restored. I proudly present our game:

Six druids have come together to perform
the yearly Super Important Ritual.
But unbeknownst to them, two traitors
have infiltrated their ranks!

Complete the rituals, but watch out for
those which fail – and who participated!

Watch your fellow players!
Identify the traitors!
(Potentially) Save the world!

A deceptive platforming game for four druids
and two traitors with XBox360 Controllers.

GGJ Page with Windows build

https://youtu.be/OKODoR44e1I

Ritual Breaker (Global Game Jam 2016) (https://youtu.be/OKODoR44e1I)

Credits:

Elise Terranova: Art, Game Design, Hat Design
Heiko Weible: Programming, Game Design
Tobias Wehrum: Programming, Game Design, Sound Design

Used assets:

Evil Laugh by The Baron
“The Snow Queen” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

This GGJ was a lot of fun and for once, I was actually happy with our core concept right from the beginning! After the initial idea from Heiko, we settled really fast on the rough plan: Some sort of single screen game where each of 6-8 players controls an avatar and accomplishes tasks with the other players. There should be a lot going on, so while the traitors try to sabotage the game, everybody should be already distracted – and even when somebody fails to do something, it might be because of difficulty instead of because of them being a traitor.

Of course, the development wasn’t such a smooth ride. Like every jam, phases where it went really well and phases where I felt like the game was going nowhere alternated. I particularly remember the first night right before sleep when I frantically wrote down seemingly brilliant ideas for how the game will not only work, but be perfect – and then the next day, when I implemented one of the ideas, only to find out that it and all of the other ideas were flawed and I had no idea how to fix it.

I suppose it’s obvious to anyone who ever tried it, but: It’s surprisingly hard to make a good traitor game! The game has to be interesting for two asynchronous sides, there is a lot of hidden information going on and both sides need meaningful actions. And ideally, every action should also help to identify who the traitors are or allow the traitors to obfuscate their identity.

In the end, after a lot of testing (thanks to all our enthusiastic testers!) and iterations, we arrived at the current concept: Six players, two of them traitors who don’t know each other, but know that they are a traitor. Then a series of three-player-rituals pops up, and players can go into them and “complete” them by pressing the A button – or fail them by pressing the B button if they are traitors. If 11 rituals are completed successfully, the players win. If 9 rituals fail, the traitors win. And if the time runs out before either happens, the players win if they can identify both traitors.

While the game offers a bit of strategy for the traitors (e.g. they can decide how long to play “good” and wait until the other traitor failed some rituals; blame somebody else for a failed ritual; wait until there are lots of rituals which only their participation needed and then fail them all), they might still struggle to successfully deceive the players because the wrong rituals spawn or they feel like they don’t have any good options. The ritual-spawning balancing was something we couldn’t properly balance before our time ran out.

In the end though, while it is a bit flawed, I am proud of the game we made there and I definitely had a good time at the GGJ 2016! Thanks a lot to the organizers, our relentless testers and my fellow team members Elise and Heiko for being such a joy to work with! And thanks to Wooga for letting us stay at their great offices here in Berlin.

PS: Here is a screenshot and a few slides that Elise made to explain the game:

Lost in the Darkness

Tobias Wehrum — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 23:47:56 +0000

Lost in the Darkness was originally made for the Ludum Dare 27 for the theme “10 seconds”. It was well-received, but had some flaws which I addressed in this post-compo build.

Find a fairy. Follow the music. Save your friends. Escape safely.

And above all: Don’t touch the darkness.

Play for free in your browser on GameJolt!

A game made by Tobias Wehrum.

With assets by:

Font “A song for Jennifer” by Brittney Murphy
Fonts “Mara’s Eye” and “Mage Script” by Neale Davidson
Atmospheric sounds by Kevin MacLeod

Zombie Planet, A Game Prototype For The Leap Motion

Tobias Wehrum — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 17:06:38 +0000

For the Human-Computer Interaction course at my university we had to do a 3d interface prototype. My team decided to make a game with the Leap Motion. And thus, Zombie Planet was born in about 3 weeks: A game that you control directly with your fingers.

Zombie Planet

Use your fingers to strike the zombies
with lightning and throw asteroids at them!

Defend your world against the invading
undead and save your people!

Download for Windows

Screenshots

Credits

Developers: Tobias Wehrum, Martin Stark, Robert Meyer, Samuel Stein
Sound Design: Iwan ‘qubodup’ Gabovitch
With sound samples from (click here for full overview): Iwan ‘qubodup’ Gabovitch, Independent.nu, jessepash, Alvinwhatup2, scarbelly25, carbilicon, esperar
Music: Kevin MacLeod
3D Art: p0ss, Moser Juan José
Font: Nate Piekos
Planet Texture: Second Mouse Studios
Particles & Effects: Unity Technologies

Made with Unity 3D.

Blood Trial (Alpha Release)

Tobias Wehrum — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 02:32:59 +0000

The theme for the Global Game Jam 2013 was the sound of a heartbeat. After briefly pondering making a game about friendship, love and the joys of life, our thoughts drifted off a bit and we made something, uh, a little bit different. Enter Blood Trial.

Blood Trial (Alpha Release)

You are participating in an
ancient ritual to appease the blood god.

Rip out other warriors hearts and sacrifice them
at the top of the temple while they’re still beating!

Keep the favor of the thirsty god and he’ll reward you generously!

Super Smash Bros. meets Mortal Kombat in
this fighting game for up to 4 players.

Download the current version for Windows

Global Game Jam entry

I’ll make a proper post about the jam and the game later (with video and all that), but I thought that it couldn’t hurt to have a link on my blog in the meantime.

Credits

Programming:

Tobias Wehrum
Benjamin Schug
Dario Seyb

Art:

Michael Kessler
Tobias Breitenbach
Kirill Krysov

Game Design, Producing and being all around awesome:

Norbert Haacks

Super Sandwich Simulator 2013

Tobias Wehrum — Sun, 12 May 2013 21:01:16 +0000

We’ve been to the Codemotion Festival Berlin and made a game jam there! Two of the three themes were “Bouncing” and “How to make a sandwich”, so it was pretty obvious what had to be done:

You are two pretty incompetent chefs,
competing to complete the correct sandwich first.

The customer has ordered!
(Poor fool.)

Prepare delicious sandwiches in this frantic game
for two players with Xbox360 gamepads.

Play it in the web player!

Download it for Windows/Mac/Linux!

Credits:

Programming: Tobias Wehrum
Music: Kevin MacLeod
Sound: Moritz Ufer
Fonts: Adam Nerland

Backstabbing & Betrayal

Tobias Wehrum — Wed, 01 May 2013 21:10:41 +0000

This week, I was at the wonderful Indie Connect. At the end was a game jam, and that’s where I started the following game for the theme “Treason”:

Arena fights are dangerous.

But at least you can trust your partner, right? Right?

To be on the safe side though, you took
some Vampiric Throwing Knives with you.
The arena rules prohibit the use
of weapons against your opponents,
but there is no mention that you
can’t use any if your partner acts up…

Collect power orbs to boost your antigravity!
Shove your opponents off the platform!

Win as a team or alone.

After all, if YOU kill your friend,
at least their power is safe with you, isn’t it?

Play it in the web player!

Download it for Windows/Mac/Linux!

Credits:

Programming: Tobias Wehrum
Music: Kevin MacLeod
Sound: Moritz Ufer, Vegemyte
Fonts: Nate Piekos and GemFonts 98

Wizard Defense: A Cooperative Augmented Reality Game

Tobias Wehrum — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 12:54:04 +0000

It sucks to be cursed. It sucks even more when you’re standing paralyzed in your own wizard tower while your arch-enemy sends hordes of hungry ghosts to gobble up your mana. Luckily your telekinetic powers are still working fine, and now you are defending yourself by redirecting energy beams from your hands with mirrors and whatever else is at hand.

Wizard Defense

You’re paralyzed. Enemies are closing in.

Redirect the energy beams with mirrors to hit the ghosts and
change their colors at the right time to exploit each ghost’s weakness!

A cooperative augmented reality game for two friends and a webcam.

Play it in the web player!
(Download and print the markers!)

Download it for Windows/Mac/Linux!

The source code is available further down in this post.

You can quit the game by pressing Escape while the menu console is showing.

Solo Play?

If you play alone, you might have some problems – it’s made for two players. If you still want to play alone, here are some cheats you can press after the first ghosts spawned so you can at least experience the gameplay: F10 triples the power of your energy beam, and F11 makes you invincible.

Open Source

This was one of my three big projects this semester, this one for the Augmented Reality course. It’s built in Unity 4, with NyARToolkit to recognize the markers. The japanese documentation makes NyARToolkit a little bit hard to read, but good examples and method names go a long way and we had a lot of fun using it.

You can download the source code and Unity 4 project here. The source code is released under the terms of the GPL v3. The assets (meshes, textures etc) are not released under any particular license. Unless mentioned otherwise on their respective source websites stated in the credits, you are not allowed to use them. If you’d like to use them anyway, feel free to contact me. (Disclaimer: The project was for a university course. Due to time constraints and that not being a requirement, the code is not well documented nor does the documentation fit the C# standards.)

Credits

Programming: Tobias Wehrum, Tobias Müller
Ingame Art: Michael Kessler
Menu Art: Mathis Widrat
Music: Kevin MacLeod
Sound: Moritz Ufer, Syna-Max, juskiddink, Pogotron, b0bd0bbs, Miselaineous, Robinhood76, Sea Fury, Vegemyte
Font: Daniel Zadorozny

Screenshots

Finally, have a few screenshots:

The Fox and the Fish in: Candy Adventures

Tobias Wehrum — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 18:07:00 +0000

Once upon a time, the Fox and the Fish found a deliciously looking piece of candy. Being Canadian animals, they were very polite and decided that the other should have it.

“You should have it, for I value your happiness more than any candy,” said the Fox to the Fish.

“So do I,” answered the Fish generously. “And you love sweets, you should have it, dear friend!”

And each shoved the candy in the direction of the other.

The Fox and the Fish

Do the polite thing – give the candy to your friend.
Don’t let him give it back to you. A gift’s a gift!

A ball-game with snake-like trail mechanics
for two friends on keyboard or gamepads.

Play it in the web player!

Download it for Windows/Mac/Linux!

The game was made in about 8 hours (plus about 1 hour later adding the small stuff, like a new font, a mute functionality and a bit of bugfixing) at the Berlin Mini Game Jam together with Norbert Haacks who contributed his artistic talent and game designer wisdom to our endeavour. Special thanks to Jana Leinweber who inspired the trails idea with a comment while playtesting early on!

I’m very pleased with how this one turned out. The trail-mechanic makes the game a lot more tactical than just pushing the ball around, and the game favors the loser increasingly more, making comebacks possible: You have to push the candy on the ground of the other player – but that ground will start to shrink in the process, giving you increasingly less space to work with.

Apart from our own result, the jam set records – when I counted midway in, we had 35 people working enthusiastically on their own games! That’s the most we ever had in the years we are organizing the jam, but then again, the number seems to be consistently rising. And the atmosphere at the presentations at the end is simply amazing! Iwan Gabovitch will make a blog post later at our blog, and there will probably be a video too.

Credits:

Programming: Tobias Wehrum
Art: Norbert Haacks
Music: Kevin MacLeod
Font: Ben McGehee

Burglary: An Action/Stealth game made for Ludum Dare 25

Tobias Wehrum — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:01:07 +0000

Ludum Dare 25 is over and I cannot wait to go to bed, but first I wanted to publish my game here too!

Burglary

Explore the premises. Evade the guards. Pick locks.
Steal the treasures! And then escape with them.

Burglary, an action/stealth game about stealing from
the rich and giving to those in need: Yourself.

Play the game on Kongregate!

Visit the Official Ludum Dare Submission!

Made completely in 48h – well, according to the Ludum Dare competition rules. I obviously used some base code and publicly available libraries. Apart from that, everything (but the preloading graphics and a very small generic shadow tiles bitmap) was made by yours truly in the 48 hours: Music, sound, graphics and code.

Used libraries/tools:

My Base Code
FlashPunk
TileLighting
Punk.Transition
Sound Effects were made with Bfxr
Music was made with the lovely autotracker-bu

Winter Sports: Ice Skating

Tobias Wehrum — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 18:45:47 +0000

Here’s an old one I never posted, and it’s about time – it’s really cool! So now without further ado, enjoy “Winter Sports: Ice Skating”, a heart-warming minimalistic game made for the TIGS Advent Calendar 2011 in about 16h.

Winter Sports: Ice Skating

You are ice skating and try to relax,
but these rude other people are making so much noise.
You are fed up, don your ice slicing skates,
and do the only reasonable thing:

You let them fall into holes in the ice.

Make holes by crossing the line you’ve sliced in the ice before.
The holes freeze again over time, but until then, try not to fall in yourself…

Play the game now directly in your browser!

Music by Kevin MacLeod
Sounds by petenice and malexmedia.