Silly Gilly: the game
In a world where sadness rules undisputed, a lonely circus named Silly Gilly embarks on a journey to spread joy and happiness over the Sadlands and bring hope to the decaying civilization, but their mission reveals itself to be more complicated and risky than expected!
In Silly Gilly, players manage and expand a circus built on a train. Alternating phases of performance and management, up to four players will have to build tents, take care of the animals, perform for the crowd, buy resources and much more in this fast-paced multiplayer management game.
In spring 2020, I took part in the ETHZ Game Programming Laboratory, where students are given the opportunity to walk through the game development process, from brainstorming to prototyping, development and release. I teamed up with other four students:
* Mikael Stellio was our wonderful Producer, and on the coding side he was in charge of the controllers and level design.
* Felix Hasler was our Technical Artist — any boy, did his animations bring the game to life!
* Elias Huwyler was in charge of our Software Architecture; it was his mad genious that structured our code so elegantly as to allow us to work efficiently in parallel.
* Silvia Nauer was our Sound Designer — she composed our wonderful soundtrack, and her sound effects added depth to the whole game experience.
* I was in charge of giving our game physics — not realistic physics, mind you, but physics that “feel good” when playing the game.
Of course we all did much more than just that: we all contributed to the design of the whole game, and besides that there were a million other aspects in the code which weren’t mentioned here! Together we created “Silly Gilly”: the game was coded in C# using the MonoGame framework and primarily targeted the XBox platform, although it can be played on Windows PC as well.
We were very happy with the result: a panel of judges from Studio Gobo, seasoned professionals in the gaming and CG industry, named our game the best of that year Game Programming Lab games. If you want to find out more about our development process, check out our report! You can also find the other games that were developed that year on the course website.