Last week I made the trip to Malaga once again to participate in the Malagajam summer edition.

My team and I already had some ideas on how we wanted to approach the jam this time. We loved an alternative control game from the previous edition: https://culoextremo.itch.io/caja, and we wanted to try experimenting and doing some alternative control game too.

So a couple of weeks prior, I purchased an Arduino board plus a sensor kit, and started learning about it, basically from zero. I found about Tinkercad, and started coding some basic examples with help of online tutorials.

You can find these, along with the code, in my profile: https://www.tinkercad.com/users/518JwInpQLt?type=circuits

I had the intuition that having something simple like that at hand was more than enough to add a cool twist to any game we would think about. And I was very lucky to receive the parts just one day prior to the jam!

The day came and the team of four drove to the Polo Digital. This time we rented an apartment right next to the premises, which improved the experience greatly. After the theme was announced: “de mal en peor”, we ran towards the closest bar, as we’ve been doing previous times, looking for inspiration. And indeed it came. We had the most hilarious interaction with an Ukrainian man selling lottery tickets. We chatted about work culture and communism, but when that was over, we decided to the game should be about what Ukraine is most famous for: Chernobyl.

We thought it would perfectly fit the theme, and we could make a control panel with all of the weird inputs we brought. As Javi also brought along some USB buttons, knobs and keypads.

We also came right away with the main mechanic. Gameloft, who was sponsoring the event, provided hand fans to all participants. And using the ultrasonic distance sensor connected to the Arduino and to the game, we thought that the most important task of the game would be blowing air with the fan to lower the reactor’s core temperature.

We also had the idea of using the gyroscope of a mobile phone, strap it to an office chair, and track the movement to rotate the in-game camera. Sadly, the tech we used for this, Unity Remote, made the game incompatible with the rest of our key-mapped inputs, so we ended up discarding the idea. Of course, Unity Remote intended use is debugging mobile apps via cable, but other alternatives are harder to implement, and we almost got away with it anyway.

After making some mini-games and some Simpsons memes, we had the game: Bernochyl.

As you can appreciate in the trailer, we build a cardboard panel with all the inputs hidden underneath. The player would pay attention to the alerts displayed in the screen, and interact with each mini-game to help keep the reactor’s temperature at bay.

Even if the mobile phone mechanic didn’t work out, I’m really proud about the alternative. Suggested by Santi, we built a dynamic camera system with Cinemachine. It worked by setting several static virtual cameras, pointing towards the different mini-game panels. And a simple manager changed the camera priority towards the current mini-game being interacted. It was a modest yet elegant design, which added a plus to the game’s quality with very little implementation effort.

The 3D look was also incredible. We were so lucky to count with Paco in the team, who would make all the 3D art and make sure everything worked perfectly in the engine.

We were also very lucky to be offered help by the in-house music studio team to make the music and SFX, which were phenomenal. And also, a neighbor group lent us their 3D printer to print the small appliances we connected to our Xbox controller joysticks.

After much balancing with Javi, we got to the end result, which I think was quite compelling. When the time for trying out games came, and even some time before that, we were visited by lots of people who had a great time. We also had a great time watching them play, as each person used a different and hilarious technique to wave the fan while trying to coordinate their other hand. They wanted to repeat their runs, recommended it to their friends, compete against each other… It was a blast!

Later that evening, we won the “Best Design” award!

You can find the game in itch.io:

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