The Backyard

Overview

The Backyard is an isometric game a five-person team built over a 48-hour GameJamPlus in Lublin: a kid’s treehouse world stitched together from the outdoor games we all played as children, floor-is-lava, tag, and the rest. It never shipped and did not place, but it was a real team crucible. Several of us were touching Unity for the first time, so most of the work was learning the engine, splitting the load, and dragging a rough idea to playable inside two days.

Technical Highlights

• Modular character customization. Rather than drawing every character by hand, a CustomModularSet assembles each kid from nine independent sprite layers (body, hair, brows, eyes, nose and mouth, plus skin, hair and shoe colour channels) drawn from authored pools, so a small art set combines into thousands of distinct looks. This was our best trick for getting variety cheaply under jam time.
• Resource-management loop. A day and night cycle with a limited hour budget and a “Caps” currency ties the minigames to a metagame, so winning a game earns money but burns hours and players have to weigh how many to risk.
• Childhood minigames. Arcade challenges sit inside that loop, including a rising “floor is lava” hazard with escalating speed phases and a game of tag driven by simple chase-and-flee agents.

Learnings

The real lesson was scoping and teamwork under a hard deadline, especially bringing teammates who were new to Unity into one shared codebase without stalling the whole group.