The Plunge

I’m really happy with how this game turned out, especially considering how I came up with the idea. The jam I joined was the Portfolio Builders Jam #60, and there wasn’t any reward or prize I just wanted the pressure and a clear timeframe to push myself. The theme of the jam was Take the Plunge , and the first things that came to mind were water and fear. But I wanted to stand out, so I thought outside the box and came up with a plunger. From there, the idea evolved into this superhero‑like weapon where you literally take The Plunge, the plunger itself being called The Plunge because of how legendary it is.

for basics i wanted essential mechanics in the game. that would set the foundation of the game i set out to complete these throughout the week

• Establish essential core mechanics to form the foundation of the game.
• Allow the player to control how hard or fast they throw The Plunge.
• Implement a basic arcade-style high-scoring system for a self-defined goal.
• Add a “Quality of Stick” attribute to the plunger to make gameplay more dynamic.

I wanted to take on this extra challenge because I wanted to become more confident with angles and vectors in Unity, as that was my main focus for this jam. The programming was challenging, but I got the hang of it in the end. Right now, the most difficult part of Unity for me personally is the Player Input system I still get a bit confused by how it works. However, because this project required a fair amount of input handling, I feel like my understanding of the system has improved a lot. A few bugs appeared during development, such as the plunger not instantiating where it was supposed to, but all of those issues were fixed in the end.

I also learned a lot about Persistance in this Jam, as it was my first time trying to maintain data from different scenes, throughout the proccess of this project i didnt structure my scripts too well and when i went on to implament persistance i had to redesign my Session Manager Script and create a new PersistanceManager script, this taught me about persistance across scenes in unity

I also want to emphasise that my focus during this jam was solely on programming. All assets used were free assets from the Unity Asset Store, as I didn’t plan on spending time creating art or models myself for this project. The only file I created personally was the narration at the beginning of the game, which I produced using a voice changer.

Video and Troubles

This Video was a first test of some of the plunger throwing, but as you can see some things werent working as expected.

And below is the video that demonstrates the first stages of throwing with power. This was later tweaked because, no matter what power you applied to the plunger, it would always end up in the same position, making it impossible for the player to score from certain distances. This happened because Force and Torque scaled linearly and in parallel. I later changed them so they scaled slightly differently from each other, allowing the player to score from anywhere. This code snippet is from an earlier version of the Attack method.