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The End is Neigh

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  • Role: Technical Designer

  • Platforms: WebGL

  • Team Size: 5

  • Duration: 3 Days

  • Responsibilities:

    • Substantial systems programming including our chunk managers, the enemy horsemen AI, and a few obstacles. 

    • Rapid brainstorming and prototyping of the game's systems and mechanics, specifically the chunk managers, horsemen AI, obstacles, and general gameplay loop.

    • Bug fixes.

    • Small VFX asset creation.

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Game Summary
The End is Neigh is a small game project submitted for the r/SoloDevelopment Winter Game Jam that took place from January 13th - 16th. Despite the subreddit’s name, a few friends and I joined as a group of five for the jam. Over the course of 72 hours, we managed to make this game completely from scratch. In The End is Neigh you play as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse who unfortunately woke up late on their big day. You must dodge and weave your way past obstacles in order to catch up to your fellow horsemen, however, they aren't about to make it easy for you. I had a lot of fun getting back in the swing of group game development and learned a lot about crunch strategies and was able to further hone my programming skills with some new coding techniques.

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AI Horsemen
Programming the horsemen's AI took up the majority of my time on this project. While we settled on a fairly simple game idea, we wanted to include a lot of cool ideas in it. The horsemen AI we're probably the most complex part of the game, aside from our player controller. We wanted to add a little personality to each of the horsemen to make them each a unique experience. That meant giving the ai special traits in addition to being modular enough in functionality to have varying intensities of the same behaviors. I managed this by using a horsemen superclass and then having 4 specific subclasses for each individual horseman. The superclass carried all the basic functionality of lane switching and obstacle avoidance/throwing, while the subclasses would take care of the personality of each horseman in how fast they throw things or the unfinished specialty moves concept (coming in the future!).

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Obstacle Design
For this project, we sped through the design so we would have as much time as possible to actually make the game. That's not to say there wasn't any, I took charge of the chunk system, four horsemen, and obstacle design. Our obstacles were divided into two main types, helpful and harmful. We settled on just two helpful obstacles in our speed boost carrot and sugar cubes to add a little bit of strategy to the gameplay. A speed boost is a classic item for infinite runners and racing games alike and they accentuate the quick decision-making skills that the player utilizes. On the other side, the harmful objects were divided further into categories; hurdles, lane switchers, multi-lane, and insta-death. Hurdles serve as the basic obstacle, able to be jumped over but slow the player down a little if hit. Lane switchers are the main punishers as they can't be jumped over, slow you down a lot, and force you to switch into the nearest open lane. Multi-lane obstacles are simply any obstacle that takes up multiple lanes as opposed to the standard one. And insta-death obstacles like the name suggests kill you instantly. Obstacles would either spawn on the ground tile chunks or be thrown by the other horsemen, allowing us to play off both randomness with the AI and curated tracks using our chunk system. 

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