Tri

Tri

First-person 3D puzzle platformer

• Ludum Dare 20

• made within 48 hours in April 2011

• C#/Unity, 3dsmax, Photoshop, bfxr, inudge

Video

Walkthrough

Links

Entry page

PLAY

Post mortem

Making of

“Tri” is another Unity game I made for a contest.

At the end of April 2011, the Ludum Dare 20 began - and I was ready to make a game from scratch in (less than) 48 hours. The theme that got the most votes from the community was “It’s Dangerous to go Alone. Take this!”, a famous quote from the original “Legend of Zelda”.

To be honest, I had the idea for my game the night before the contest started (and the theme was revealed), which was 4 o’clock in the morning in my timezone. So I was kind of lucky my idea more or less fit the theme when I woke up, as I don’t think I would have finished the game if I first had to come up with a core gameplay.

Now, “Tri” is a puzzle game inspired by “Portal”, where you have to think your way through the environment (instead of just shooting bullets into enemies). “Tri” uses ego perspective and the normal shooter control layout, but gives you only one weapon - the “Tri Force Field Generator Gun” (the name is an oh so clever reference to the “Zelda” games). With this gun, you can shoot three force field generators which will stick to the grey surfaces. If you place the generators correctly, a force field with the shape of a triangle will appear. As you can walk on this force field, it is a device to create platforms to reach places too high or far away.

There also are laser rays which you can reflect with your force fields, so you can redirect them and therefore activate or destroy certain obstacles. There are no limitations of how much triangles you can create, therefore the game is a little bit easy - on the other side it’s great fun to build as much force fields as you can, so why restricting the player here?

After the event I chose to put the game from the normal “Compo” into the “Jam” (which is the same contest, but with relaxed rules and no chance to get voted for), as I used some code from the Unify Wiki for the first person controller. (The inbuilt controller had a gameplay-breaking bug.) I wrote the majority of the gamelogic by myself, nonetheless. Complying with the rules, I did everything else, too - graphics, sound effects (with bfxr and music. The music was made by clicking randomly in inudge an hour or so before deadline.

“Tri” was mentioned with a screenshot right in the official result announcement!

Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2 Screenshot 3 Screenshot 4