Modern K-Art: Auction House

Unity Engine

Juice Jam II 2023

Developed over 9 days

Modern K-Art: Auction House was my submission for Juice Jam II 2023. I was responsible for the full design of this project and the pixel art. Third party resources were used for music, fonts, shaders, and stock photos. I had the idea of “painting art with collisions” to make it juicy and expanded the gameplay to include bullet hell mechanics along with a guessing game. A design goal I had for this project was to implement randomized gameplay challenges. Every project I had made up to this point was linear, so this was my first attempt at non-linear progression.

Gameplay Overview

The jam's theme was “paying the price” and so I landed on the auction house concept. Each level the player will have to guess the true value of a painting at an art auction. They do this by colliding into insight orbs and correct key word. With enough understanding of the painting, the player will receive a monetary value as their score. For this project I created dynamic gameplay through randomized challenges. Bullet hell mechanics both stifle and assist a player’s ability to guess the correct descriptor for each painting – the better they do, the better they get at guessing.

Improving the game with playtesting and feedback

  • I asked friends and family to playtest early in the build. It became clear the game was too hard out the gate. Playtesters ignored the word guessing mechanic and focused only on avoiding bullets.

  • In response to feedback, a tutorial level was introduced at the start of the game.

  • The tutorial level provides an example of all the challenges the players will face and advances once they beat the level.

  • After including the tutorial, players had much better clarity about the core game mechanics.

Making the game juicy

  • Collision will always result in visual or audio feedback that conveys positive or negative results. Since the game was very busy, it was important for players to know if something positive or negative occurred.​

  • Screen shatter effect when the player loses all their lives and need to restart.

  • Bullet-time mechanic to help the player "ride the wave" of the more intense bullet hell segments.

  • Elements with springy ease in and out animations

Post-Jam Evaluation

What went well?

  • Due to the design challenges I gave myself, I was able to learn much more about shaders and applying randomized gameplay elements to my projects.

  • The screen shatter effect is a fun surprise that a lot of players enjoyed.

  • The animations and audio design add a lot to the game feel and immersion.

  • Although the gameplay is hard, the controls are responsive and feels really good with a controller.

What went wrong?

  • This jam was a good lesson in realizing that scope can be subtle. It's easy to chop an entire system to meet a deadline, but it's harder to understand that systems that sound simple may involve more steps than anticipated. 

  • The difficulty of the game was inconsistent and the most difficult segments are not challenging in an interesting way - they're a bit too chaotic.

  • It's clear from working on this project that designing an engaging bullet hell is more about timing and flow. If too much is randomized then the game will feel more overwhelming then challenging. 

  • It could have been clearer that players can skip the intro text - not all players realized this since the notification was timed. 

  • The game could have been more juicy! Due to the scope issues I had, a lot of time went into animating the UI elements and programming the randomized content.