Stink Bubble

Gameplay GIF of the player's green stink bug character flying around a room trailing green particles of stink, with 3D people moving around the room and bubbles drifting through the air

Gameplay GIF of the player's green stink bug character hovering down to collect a bubble, encasing itself and its green stink particles inside

Gameplay GIF of the player's green stink bug character flying around inside a bubble, being physically pushed around by a spinning ceiling fan

Gameplay GIF of the player's green stink bug character flying inside a bubble, then colliding with a 3D person's head inside the room, causing them to disappear and the player's score to increase

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Background

I built Stink Bubble with a team during Global Game Jam in January 2025. I hadn't participated in GGJ 2024 for family reasons, so it was great to see my fellow Cleveland Game Developers again. I entered the venue right as they were announcing the year's theme: "Bubble", an uncharacteristically specific theme; usually GGJ themes were more abstract concepts open to interpretation, like "Transmission" or "Home"!

As usual, I found myself chatting with some other participants about their ideas. One group said that they had some fun ideas but the scope would be limited by whether or not they could get a programmer. Their 3D modeler, Alex Sierputowski, was a guy whose work had impressed me at previous CGD events, and I soon learned that he had experience at Riot and Capcom. I always like to work with devs that have knowledge/experience beyond mine, and I was excited by the opportunity to make a 3D game, so I agreed to join!

The final team included myself (a programmer and Unity generalist), Alex (3D modeling/texturing and level design), Keyon Cohen (another general programmer with whom I had worked at GGJ 2023), Malik Akbar (a 2D artist), a music/sound designer, and my business partner Matt Samardge (a 2D artist, with whom I hadn't actually worked on High Hand Hold'em in nearly a year!). The game came together quite well, with Alex cranking out 3D models and textures at an incredible rate. We didn't have time to include any of the UI art that Matt had drawn though, unfortunately.

Game Concept

The team had waffled back and forth on various game concepts during the first night of the jam, including an endless runner or multiplayer brawler. We kept imagining a birthday party setting, where one might find a lot of bubbles, with an animal trapped inside a bubble. We originally considered a kitten, but my very literal self suggested that it be something small like an insect– specifically, a stink bug, as my family always had a bunch of those in our house during the summer. That led to: a stink bug trapped in a bubble during a party, taking out its frustration by growing the bubble to make big stink bomb and gross out all the party guests.

In its final form, Stink Bubble is a 3D, 3rd-person arcade game for PC and web. The player flies around collecting bubbles to grow their bubble, then runs into people's faces to pop the bubble and release their stink. The player's bubble is constantly shrinking, and they get more points for having a larger bubble when they hit a person, so the goal is to get the highest score possible.

The player control scheme is interesting: they can only move within three "planes" in the room parallel to the ground, or hover up/down between those planes. Our original idea was that the room is so large compared to the stink bug that each plane would feel far apart and unique, with different obstacles and collectibles, and high depth of field to focus on the current plane. All we really had time for was ceiling fans that push the player/bubbles in the top plane, furniture in the bottom plane, and humans that can only be "hit" in the middle plane.

Technical Details

This was the first 3D game that I had made for a game jam (other than a very basic one that I tried to make by myself at a jam back in 2017).

I programmed all of the physics-based movement, random physics-based motion of the bubbles and people, the physics of the ceiling fans pushing bubbles and the player away, and the logic for keeping score and managing match state. I also implemented two particle systems for the player's "stink particles" (or "farticles" as we called them!): one with particles trailing behind the player in world space, and one with the particles constrained to a small sphere around the player in local space. Toggling between these particle systems gave the impression of actually "trapping" the player's stink inside a bubble, or releasing it when the bubble pops!

This was the first time that I used Unity's UI Toolkit for a game jam (though I had used it briefly on a hobby project in early 2024). The UI was all very basic, but I was making use of custom USS classes by the end of the jam to give buttons a unique font and background image. This game also represented my most extensive use of Unity's InputSystem package to date, using the recommended callback-based Input Action workflow with type-safe C# API generation.

This was also the first Global Game Jam where I was able to include my full UnityUtil library in the project, now that it is encapsulated in UPM packages easily consumable via a Git URL. UnityUtil allowed me to handle Unity's update loop more efficiently (important for all the moving bubbles/people), and manage IoC dependencies across scenes.