Goo Surge, our submission for the Pirate Software Jam 2024 is now out. It was created by a team of 4 university students, and for most of us it was our first Jam. The theme was "It's Spreading", and our game involves an ever-spreading pool of goo that is capable of destroying nearly everything in the level!

At the start of the jam, we spent quite a while coming up with ideas and themes before eventually deciding the thing in our game that is "spreading" would be goo!

We're pretty proud of the final game, though there is many areas for improvement (and probably many bugs), especially involving performance.

From a technical standpoint, the game uses compute shaders to have every pixel of the goo processed, something we are still surprised we managed to achieve in two weeks, having never done any GPGPU programming before. We found Unity's compute shaders quite intuitive and easy to use, and we managed to get some goo logic much faster than expected. Since this is a core feature of the game (and would probably be impossible otherwise), the game is download only, slightly hindering our reach.

We hope that anyone who plays it find it interesting,  and gives their opinion on where the game could improve!

-HeavyMetalGameDev