Magic Penguin vs Giant Chicken

Hello, everyone! I hope you’re well. This time I will be sharing one of the game projects that I finished during the Unity course I took a few months ago. This is perhaps the project that I’m the most proud of. Introducing…

Magic Penguin vs Giant Chicken

You can download the game for free on itch.io.

Now, first of all, a disclaimer: this game is a prototype which was made in only three weeks, while having almost no prior knowledge of 3D game development, and 95% of the assets used are free assets taken from the Unity Asset Store or OpenGameArt.org. It doesn’t feel polished at all, particularly the particle effects, which are a bit abrupt, as well as the map layout, which can be awkward.

That said… I’m still proud of it, I find it fun and the final boss scene in particular (which even includes a small cinematic with sound effects and a camera angle change!) is pretty cool. I just love killing cute voxel chickens with thunder magic.

Curiously enough, I made this game before I got hooked into Minecraft (which is one of my current obsessions), but by then I had already been watching some Minecraft gameplays and streams and I found the idea of building an entire map out of voxels very interesting. So that’s exactly what I did… instead of using a premade terrain or pre-made assets, I took the basic “cube” object in Unity, added some pixel textures to the cubes and started building the entire game map cube by cube. Pretty insane if you ask me, but it was fun.

(later, I had to use a plugin to unify all those cubes into a single object, because game performance was really, really bad with so many objects on the scene at once)

Another peculiar detail about this game is that my class assignment wasn’t actually to make a voxel game… not even a 3rd person game or a platformer. I was supposed to be making a first person shooter! However, since shooters aren’t really my thing, I thought that I could craft a more Nintendo-esque experience by having a fixed camera perspective and adding all of the mechanics of a shooter (life bar, ammo, different weapons, enemies, etc.) but with a wildly different theme and tone. So I managed to fulfill the requirements of the assignment, without actually making a FPS. Victory!

During the course, I took it upon myself to introduce penguins into my games as often as possible. In fact, I think only one of the games didn’t include penguins at all, simply because I couldn’t find the right assets (it was a minimal 3D racing game and it was very difficult to fit penguins into that without making the assets myself). But I thought it would be fun, since my nickname and Internet presence are linked to a penguin character, to make everything about penguins, to have some thematic consistency and challenge myself somehow.

Fortunately, for this project I could find this free Unity Asset with several preanimated voxel characters, including a penguin. I only had to add a couple of animations myself, since the basic ones where already included. It’s an excellent asset and the animals are really cute. In the end the only one I didn’t end up using is the dog, sadly, because I didn’t really have the time to include more kinds of enemies.

Now, as I said the game is just an unpolished prototype, but I’ve managed to beat it several times myself with no game-breaking bugs (not to say there are none, though, I’m sure there are), so if you want to give it a try, please do so! You might have to attempt a few gameplays before you can reach the final boss, though, since if you don’t know the scene layout, it’s hard to finish it in just ten minutes. Once you do know the layout, though, it’s pretty straightforward.

Thanks for reading and best wishes!