Shear Carnage
Shear Carnage was an XNA game for Windows Phone 7 that was built by Alex Rodgers, John van Rijj, and myselft. The game was developed for our first “Three Thing Game” 24 hour Game Jam at The University of Hull in 2012.
Teams are given three Things to incorporate into their game, our Things were “Firework”, “High-Dive”, and “<Blank>” (Choose your own Thing). For our third Thing we then chose “Sheep”, and the game idea became a Missile Command style game, where the player is a farmer who has to deal with crafty Sheep that are high-diving into your farm to eat your luscious grass. The farmer defends himself and his crops with his stash of Fireworks. We decided on this as it was a compact idea that easily incorporated our things, and was achieveable in the 24 hour time frame.
As this was our first Game Jam and the team had only a few months programming experience, and even less experience with our Source Control software SVN, it proved difficult to have all three of us working on the code at the same time. We divided work into writing the code and producing the assets, I concentrated on the assets and tried to assist the other team members in any other way possible, whilst John and Alex got stuck into building the codebase, whilst trying not to edit files the other was working on.
At the end of the 24 hours we had a stable, reasonably polished game that was proving to be quite fun. We incorporated particle systems and used them at any point we could, which resulted in a gib-filled experience for players, a firework with a fizzing trail, and an unnervingly satisfying rain of blood and sheep parts when dispatching diving enemies. We also included a variety of enemies including a speedy “Super Sheep” with a cape. To aid the player we provided powerups, including a protective laser that would provide the player with a short respite, and faster firework firing so the player could spray the sky with defensive munitions.
The linked video above shows the judges evaluating our game, and three very tired team members. To our surprise we were awarded second place for our troubles, the judges praised the polish the game had, the fact that it had a full gameplay cycle, and that it had social media integration as players could post their high score onto their social network of choice. We returned for the next Three Thing Game during the first semester of our second year and created an “R-Type” inspire game called “Hypermorph”. Again to our surprise this managed to win the competition. You can read more about that project on Alex’s website..
