Spring Fever is a short puzzle-game I created in under 5 days for the 2020 Unreal Spring Jam. The theme for the game jam was: “What Is Hidden In Snow Comes Forth In The Thaw.” I adapted this theme to a puzzle game by creating mechanics centered around the character and the level melting each time the player moves. Spring Fever takes place on a handful of floating islands where the player must move a snowman to a flurry cloud across the island to escape from the spring heat.
I came up with the rudimentary concept for Spring Fever fairly quickly after seeing the jam theme. This allowed me to get started on the main functionality of the game very early, using plain geometric shapes as placeholder elements. However, at that time all I could imagine was a block of ice trying to reach some arbitrary point in the level without melting. I had trouble coming up with an interesting context for these mechanics that was within the scope of 5 days. Originally, I wanted players to control an animal that thrived in a cold environment but was stuck in a warmer region during the spring season. This would require the animal to escape north for survival in a colder ecosystem, tying in with the theme perfectly and giving players a character they can feel empathetic towards. A snowman doesn’t exactly provide the same feeling of empathy, it's not something we recognize as a living creature.
That animal concept still sounds more appealing to me than what I ended up with, but I didn’t have the time to implement such a complex character. This would involve creating a model with more complicated parts and would also require animations for leg movement. Realistically, if I wanted to have an animal in the game I would have to use a pre-made asset. I considered this but decided to find a different solution because I wanted to create as much as I possibly could by myself from scratch. Instead of using an animal, I went with the snowman. I got away with creating a single looping animation of the snowman slouching back and forth using a simple 3-bone rig. In the engine, I applied physics to the animations and bobbed the snowman backward when it moved to provide feedback to the player. In half a day I had the snowman modeled, animated, and implemented in the game. This was definitely a sacrifice I made but was also a vital decision that allowed me to polish the game as much as I did. Without this thematic switch, I don't think Spring Fever would feel good to play or look nearly as visually appealing.
The systems I created for Spring Fever have lots of variability in puzzle design but I feel that I didn’t get to make use of them in the ways I intended. By the time the systems were fully working and polished I had a very limited amount of time to design, implement, and decorate levels. I ended up with only 6 levels, which contained puzzles that were too easy and didn’t feel very rewarding to solve. Without the proper time to design puzzles with a strong “aha” moment, the game felt a bit lacking. Not to mention all the other mechanics I had to cut out, for example, blocked passages would require keys to unlock. I had the idea of freezing items like keys or collectibles in ice blocks to create more steps to complete the level, making it less of a straightforward path to the goal. However, yet again the time constraint didn’t allow for this and I had to stick with only the most fundamental mechanics of the game.
With such a low quantity of levels that were also fairly simple to solve, I wish I had spent less time polishing and more time designing fun and interesting puzzles. This would have made the game feel much more rewarding to play, but I’m still happy with the end product. It may not have won, but Spring Fever did get an honorable mention in the game jam, putting it among the top 30 games of the total 276 submissions.