The Living Circus - January-March 2021 Unity Microgame Contest "Not-Entry"

[JJ Tong (zfogshooterz)]

So yeah, I'm just going to post this here to add to the activity and also, I thought it would be cool to show this off too as it's the only "MOC-ing" I've done in the recent times. 

First and foremost, I'll put the link to play the game in Unity right here - https://play.unity.com/mg/lego/the-living-circus

The Living Circus is a game about you, the player trying to collect a certain amount of Dark-Screams in an obstacle course circus under a time limit.

Back in 2021, Lego and Unity announced the first contest to make a game using the Lego Microgame within Unity's game engine. Sounds really cool so I decided to do it with ideas bustling in my head (the exclusive minifigure was also a carrot on a stick too haha). This was my first time venturing into unity, and thanks to my brother's help on messing with unity more first or this would've been a real pain to do as a first timer haha.

The Theme

I want to add that the idea of this game was mainly inspired by the Ghost Rider Gameboy Advance game from 2007 (You can probably tell that this game might be dark), particularly the settings of part 1 (Hell) and 5 (Circus). This game was part of my childhood nostalgia as the gameboy belonged to my cousin and I only get to play it every once in a while. Though I manage to get an emulator to play the game of PC to get a feel for it again.

Concepts

Initial concepts was pretty unrealistic. I wanted to add combat and boss fights within a huge and long obstacle course. Of course, as a first timer, extremely unrealistic. I also wanted to add multiple levels and a sort of cutscenes but due to procrastinations and a lack of motivation during the middle period, I didn't get to add them later. The game eventually got scaled down to a one level arena obstacle collecting course.

Builds

So yeah, here are the builds I've done in this game. Some are not that impressive but I'll put it here anyway. Why am I using screenshots and not renders? Well....during late 2021, my hard drive suffered multiple failures. And I didn't back my work up.... Yeah, big mistake. Thankfully, they are kinda simple enough that I can redo them when I want to remake the game again in the future.

1) The "Entrance" - I dig the skull cave prefab but it couldn't be modified so I had to rebuild the skull from scratch to be able to modify it to the way I liked.

 

2) Bumper Kart Pillars - This was meant to be an easy-tiered enemy that will chase you. Unfortunately due to floor clipping issues, they ended becoming decorative pieces.

 

3) The seats - Since this was a circus arena I wanted to add seats that also gives off a sinister vibe and feel. There's also hard-tiered enemy karts that ended up being side decorative pieces which adds more sinister vibes.

 

4) Clown-Lamps -They decorative lamp piece that I thought it would be cool to surround the circus with to give more "light" to the show.

 

5) Dark-Scream Platforms - These are the platforms that will signify that the objectives are floating above it. They also kill the player when contact is made.

 

6) Clown Tower - This build is meant to be the living circus itself. It was supposed to fire lasers from its eyes but...the fps lag is just too great with that implemented so I scrapped it and now the tower's just a decorative piece. There's also two enemy karts of a new tier that's stored in its lower part but they're decorative now.

 

 

 

There's also purple spinning rock contraptions but it was a prefab piece, all I did was make the rock glow purple.

 

Why wasn't this an entry?

Well, simply put - Lego ended up rejecting the entry due to it not being appropriate. Probably because this was horror-themed or death was mentioned in the menu. I could maybe tweak and resubmit but.....this entry was submitted about ten minutes before the contest closes haha...

 

So yeah, while this is the only remnant of the game, I plan to remake a better version of the game someday in the future. I had a blast making this (when the wheel gets rolling) and it was the highlight of 2021 for me.  

Edited April 29, 2022 by JJ Tong (zfogshooterz)