Ninjago! Lego x Unity 1-Button Game Challenge

Months after the Lego x Unity Summer Game Jam, they announced a new challenge: Make a 1-button game!

New Contest - The LEGO® NINJAGO® & 1-Button Game Challenge

Can you create a digital game, which plays using only one button? In this contest, we’re looking for entertaining one button games which can be ...

LEGO IDEAS LogoJacobM366

As the challenge title says, participants were asked to create a game where the only control is to press a button. They also gave three categories to choose from:

• Lego Ninjago themed
• Choose your own theme
• Behaviour bricks-only game

I decided to go with the Lego Ninjago theme because I want to use the Lego assets and I don't want to be limited by the behaviour bricks.

The examples are mostly runner games or platformer games. In an attempt to standout and because my chosen theme includes Ninjas, I decided to make a fighting game. What could go wrong, right?

I mentioned before that I had a 3-year break from Unity. In my previous game jams, I focused on familiarizing with the latest Unity engine interface and review the basic scripting (C#). This time, my main focus was scriptable objects.

I used the scriptable objects as states for the attack-combo system. With scriptable objects, I was able to mix and match the actions and attack of the character based on the number of consecutive button presses and their timings.

My solution is still rough on the edges. Currently, I have a few specialized states with scripts inheriting from the general state class. To improve this, I need to find a better way to generalize the scriptable objects and make them reusable; meaning I should only need to create a scriptable asset if I need a new action instead of creating an action subclass script.

I can't decide if I will still fix and improve this game but I'm sure that I will reference this for my future projects. For now, you can try the game here.