Root of all evil is a real time puzzle game in which you manage the roots of a tree made of pure evil. Succesfuly guide the roots to spread out and soak up as much nutrients to keep the tree growing until it finally blossoms.
After enjoying taking part in the previous year's global game jam @ Goldsmiths university, I was definitely going again, this time I turned up as a student after deciding to apply to Goldsmiths in april of 2022. We had the pleasure of a good few artists at our teams disposal this year, so the game ended up looking pretty solid. I noticed a lot more positive feedback while sharing this game around with people than ever before so I'm very proud of what we managed to do in 48 hours with this game!
We decided to make this game our entry to the GDWC 2022 Student Game Awards despite the fact that most other entries had a much longer development time compared to our jam game made in 3 days, we ended up making it to the final in the top 5!
During the jam, the system I had for the camera simply had it be attached to whatever root the player was controlling, they could cycle through the roots by pressing tab. Of course once the player progressed and was controlling a large amount of roots spread about the play area, it meant the camera was jumping back and forth every time the player was trying to take control of a particular root.
A couple hours after the jam ended, I went back to this and worked on a new system in which the player could scroll freely with their mouse scroll wheel and click on whichever root they wanted to control. If they wanted to quickly snap the camera back to the root they currently had control of, they could press space and this would also have the camera follow the root until the player used the scroll wheel once more.
