Faster Than Life – Global Game Jam 2019 Project

Like in the previous year, I took part in the Global Game Jam. I joined a team of six programmers, unfortunately there was a shortage of artists this year. During the 48 hour jam, we made a space game that is inspired by Faster Than Light.

You travel through a sector of solar systems, with the goal to make your way home. In each system, you need to collect jump fuel to jump to the next system. You can die by crashing into a planet or by flying too far into deep space. The amount of fuel in the spacecraft is also limited, but it regenerates over time.

My contribution was making the planets move on somewhat realistic, elliptical orbits. I wanted to achieve the same for the spaceship, but didn't manage to do it in time. So now it has semi-realistic physics, but it's influenced by all bodies in the system. I hope that I'll do more with realistic orbits in Unity in the future.

Our team put quite some effort into making procedurally generated low-poly planets. These ended up being quite small in the levels, so we added "personal" planets to our credit screen:

You can download the game on the Global Game Jam website or watch me play through it below.