Stick Up Rodeo

Description

Stick up Rodeo is a first person shooter where you play as a man whose horse was stolen by an evil glue factory, and now you have to use your other horse as a weapon in your raid of the factory.

v1.0 was the product of a game jam and it took place in a combat arena, with the main goal being to survive a horde of glue factory employees as they chased you forever. My primary role in the initial jam was the creation and implementation of sounds and voice lines, though I helped a little bit with programming where needed.

v2.0 was a result of me returning to the project for another 3 day sprint. This time around you must fight your way through a factory level, hunting down the evil factory workers before reaching the end and rescuing your darling horse. All of the changes made in this version were made by me.

Background

Stick Up Rodeo was a jam game me and some friends made for the Winnipeg Game Collective’s PegJam 2025.
The theme was unconventional weapons, and my friend Anna is just a little bit obsessed with horses. It was in these conditions that my buddy Olivier came up with the idea of a man using his horse’s aversion to medication as a weapon. Those 3 days ended with a game that was playable, but missing a bunch of the stuff we would have loved to include.

After the game jam was complete, I thought it would be fun to return to the project for another 3 days on my own and see what I could do to get that game closer to what we envisioned.

Goals

The goal for the initial game jam version was the same as any game jam game. Come up with an idea we'd all enjoy for three straight days, and finish as much of that idea as humanly possible within 3 days.

For v2.0, the goal was to make a remastered version of Stick Up Rodeo, with a new level, improved enemy AI, improvements to the game’s audio balancing, better implementation of sound effects, new voice lines, bug fixes and a number of other small quality of life improvements. All of this in 3 days and without the help of the full team.

Reflections

While making v1.0 with the team I learned a lot about the importance of scope. I also learned some of the basics of using a synthesizer to make SFX. v1.0 released with some pretty bad audio mixing, so I learned pretty handily how important it is to balance the sound of your game.

I went into v2.0 with all of these lessons, and because of that I was able to make v2.0 something much closer to what we envisioned. Because my goals were much less focused on one specific aspect of the design this time around, I was able to to experiment with and learn a lot more about how to use Unity. I gained a much more developed understanding of sound implementation, as well as the use of NavMesh in level design.

A Fun Fact About This Project

When presenting this game at the jam's final showcase, my collaborators got dressed up as cowboys. I did not, because:

• I did not own the appropriate attire.
• I am a coward.