Background

The Toughest Journey Game was a game based on a TV ad. It had a retro arcade style and involved the journey of a player going from club to country to Croke Park.

It was created with Angular, using PixiJS for the canvas rendering and a Node.js backend. We used Colyseus for the socket and multiplayer aspects of the game. I was heavily involved in creating the UI and assisting another developer with optimising assets.

Within the game there were 3 "kicking" games, and 2 mini games. Each kicking game had you go from club to county to eventually playing in Croke Park. With each new scene there were new challenges. The wind would gradly become more of a challenge for players to overcome. On some scenes there were also additional obstacles like birds or drones.


Depending on what county you pick, your character would have a different jersey on.


An example mini game where the player has to press the button at the right time to lift enough weights.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges was asset management. We had 34 counties to play as, men and womens GAA teams, which comes to 68 different “base” assets. Then for each sprite sheet there were 12 different images that made up the kicking animation. Dealing with all of these files was a challenge but I used asset packing to reduce the file size as much as possible. We also made use of lazy loading assets so the game was performant.