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Park After Dark

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Development span: January 17-19 2025 (48 hours)

Project Type

  • Collaborative - 4 Person Team

My Roles

  • Programmer, Designer

Source Code

Download and Play

Made For
Our title screen, with a suite of choices so nice you almost wouldn't think we made them in 48 hours! The tutorial area allows players to learn everything about the game with no consequences: trash is worth points, and standing in lights makes your detection meter increase, which will lead to a game over if it becomes full. In the game level, things start out simply. Each time you pick up all the availible trash, a new configuration of more will spawn, and as time goes on and you collect more trash, more security measures enter the arena.

About the Project

Park After Dark is a top-down arcade action stealth game about being sneaky and scoring high! This game jam's theme was 'Theme Park,' and my team decided to turn out the lights and get crafty with a style of game we knew we could both create and polish to be fun and engaging within the time restrictions. As the most experienced programmer, I developed the movement, scoring, and scaling difficulty systems, programmed the UI and leaderboard, and assisted with the light detection system.

Out of those, my favorite system is definitely the scaling difficulty. To maintain an arcade style of gameplay, there is no true win condition in Park After Dark, only the chance to get the highest score before you lose. I built and balanced the introduction of new hazards and hazard types into a play session, tying the ramping difficulty to both time elapsed and how well the player is scoring.

Get far enough in, and there's nowhere to hide: Floodlights from helicopters, rolling food carts, and an overwhelming amount of ground forces make you question how much of this park's budget is raccoon theft prevention. Each light is a different color and size to make differentiating them a snap judgement. The game over screen tallies your points for you category by category for the sake of anticipation. There are some bonuses tallied here that the player can't see while playing, either, so their final score is always worth waiting for! We kept track of everyone's high scores when running our table at the jam, so they're immortalized here as a way of saying thank you to everyone who came by! (I've since beaten them all, though.)

Programming Accomplishments

  • Programmed a 2D character controller with a recharging dash using Unity's New Input System
  • Programmed and animated various hazard elements with different movement and timing behaviors
  • Programmed a ramping arcade-style difficulty curve manager
  • Led programming on user interfaces

Other Accomplishments

  • Contributed to design of gameplay, level, and theme
  • Contrubuted to design of game over and leaderboard UI screens

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