Yaoguai Jump

Lets jump some Yaoguai!

Gameplay: In ‘Yaoguai Jump’, you play as a young Spanish boy named Pedro, who through time travel hijinks, is currently a Daoist priest in training in ancient China! Hop skip and jump your way your way around the arena to beat up the Yaoguai, and progress in your training!

Application of Themes: This game was created as a part of a team for the University of Portsmouth Game Jam Autumn 2026. Our themes were Spooky, Pedro Antonio Gines Esteo, and, Chewang, Lanling County. We decided to set our game in ancient Chewang which, in lack of extensive environment, was simplified to ancient China. To implement the spooky theme we made our main enemy Yaoguai. Similar to Yokai in Japan, Yaoguai are supernatural creates often nefarious in nature. Our enemies are a subset of Yaoguai known as Jiangshi. They are zombie/vampire-like creatures and the name literally translates to 'stiff corpse'. Jiangshi are often exorcised by Taoist or Daoist priests using talismans. Placing one on their head petrifies them.

Our Jiangshi move towards the player in very specific ways. We programmed them so their movements are representative of the 6 types of chess pieces. The enemies are confined to a grid where they locate the next valid position closest to the player.

Meanwhile the player character, named Pedro after Pedro Antonio Gines Esteo, has a seperate attack collider at his feet so that he may only defeat the Jiangshi by jumping on their heads.

UI: While I helped with some small functions collecting and setting variables from the player and overall scene changes, UI was my main contribution in this project. I developed a timer that the other programmers based the enemy waves on, HUD icons that gave in-game player feedback, a leaderboard to display top 5 scores stored in a json file, and other canvases to assist with cleanly opening and closing gameplay.

The leaderboard in particular was interesting. Name input is collected from the player with a three character limit. I then decided to have it sort the file when it is giving me the data to populate the leaderboard using .OrderByDescending() with a limit to only give me the top 5. While this works for a small game, I foresee issues with the json file potentially becoming too big. There is a hotkey to clear the file/leaderboard, yet that is a dev feature. In the future it may be better to validate the entry against other entries so the json file will only contain the top 5. Additionally adding duplicate name validation would be a good addition.

Credits given to my amazing game jam team:
Ryan Bester - Programmer
Kieran Reid - Programmer and UI development
Riley Noles - Programmer
George Smith - Character Artist
Will - Environment Artist
Matthew Shelley - Music and Sound Effects
Grace Lewis - Producer