Sonar

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Sonar is my second published indie title, that spawned from a 48 hour game jam. The game is a platformer, where you must use sound as your source of sight. The surrounding level is illuminated upon loud noises, including the sound of your built in bat sonar!

You play as a rather large bat, who, due to his large size, is unable to lift himself off the ground with his small wings! Regardless, you must pursue, or be crushed by the ever more collapsing mine shaft around you.

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My Role:

I was the lead programmer in this project. I worked alongside a friend who provided the programming for some of the game features, like the dripping rocks, and the sonar pulse animations. One of the interesting stumbling blocks of the project, was figuring out the proper trigonometry math to fire the sonar pulses properly. The game jam took place in our college building, so we offered to help some other programmers, in exchange for some math lessons to refresh our trigonometry. This project was a very fun, and passionate one, with lots of features planned, so much that our scope was almost too large. The game is still in development outside of the game jam, due to this high enthusiasm for the game.

During this project, working with Unity's shaders was an interesting new challenge for me, as certain game elements had to illuminate 2D sprites. It was simple enough to create lighting effects, but the lighter it got, the more transparent the sprites became, and so different standards for sprites had to be made, to ensure level tiles did not overlap.
One of the time management decisions that was made, was to make sure everything was loosely coupled, and modular, so it could be handed off to our team of level designers, to create levels for the game quickly and easily during the last few hours of the game jam. It ended up being very successful!

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This game is released! If you'd like to give it a try, click the button below, it's free!

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