Turtle Quest
Turtle Ocean Clean-Up Mobile Game
Turtle Quest is a 3D mobile game where you play as a turtle in an interactive underwater environment that has become filled with trash. Your goal is to recycle the cans and plastic bags to clean up your ocean home, while eating jellyfish for speed boosts and avoiding the shark that is hunting you down!
The Game
Turtle Quest is a turtle ocean clean-up mobile game made with Unity C# at the Global Game Jam 2019. The most unique part of this game was the fact that the game was made without using any traditional art assets. The terrain, coral, rocks, and kelp were procedurally generated, the textures were done with shader programs, and everything else was built with Unity primitive shapes.
Prior to the jam, my friend John and I had a simple plan: find an artist and we could handle the programming. However, once the jam began, we struggled to find an artist to join us. After we heard about the different diversifiers this year, one in particular caught our attention: Assetless. The idea was to build your game with no traditional art assets. And so we began this journey just the two of us.
Our Global Game Jam submission page can be found here.
The Team
The Lessons
Although I did not contribute to this project as much as I would have liked to, it was still an interesting and creative experience in which I learned quite a bit. I was able to build the shark and turtle models using only Unity primitives, as well as building the jellyfish and plastic bags out of particle systems using only the default particle. This was the first time that I was actually an "artist" on a team, and it pushed my creative limits to be able to make things with such few available resources.
My friend John did most of the heavy-lifting on the programming side, creating the procedurally generated terrain, rocks and coral, as well as writing all of the shaders. While I knew some things about procedural generation, it was helpful to see him work with shaders (which I had very little experience with) and I was able to learn a decent amount about them during the game jam.