Force of Nature

Force of Nature is a multiplayer button mashing cooperative party game made for the 2018 Game With US Game Jam. In a Game Jam, each team has 48 hours to design and build a game. The theme for this Game Jam was “Force”. We decided to interpret that as “Force of Nature”. Our game has up to 4 players trying to battle the creatures of a forest. The goal is to destroy all home trees, but there is a twist…

All players are tethered together at the centre of a mother-ship by chains. Each player is constantly moving forward, and can control their direction as well as booster engines and brakes. The players must work together to combine their propulsion forces to go in the desired direction and avoid being damaged by the woodland creatures. Forces combine, so if 4 players point in the same direction, they will have 4 times their normal speed. In order to slow down, they must rebalance their net force. This can be especially tricky if there are enemies behind, as players can only shoot forward.

The game was built using the Unity 2D game engine over 48 hours. We created almost everything from scratch. My main contributions were menu design and laying down some sick beats to create the soundtrack, as well as playtesting and debugging. We accomplished a lot over 48 hours and the game, while buggy, turned out quite well. With some polish and tweaking, I think the mechanics of the game could give some fun gameplay.

If you are interested, check out the repository on Github. There is currently no pre-built executable that can be downloaded, so it will need to be loaded in as a Unity project to play. The game can be played with 1-4 players, and controls work best with a USB gaming controller. I highly recommend trying it with 4 players if you can.