10 / 01 / 2021
This game was developed for an assignment in my second year at university, where we were tasked with building upon a given game template. While I have been learning Unity for a little while, this was my first ‘proper’ game using the engine.
The template we were given featured logic for: the player’s movement and firing, the bullet’s movement and collision, and the enemy’s movement, health and collision. It also included the basic ‘textures’ and models, as well as the camera and lighting. Excluding those components, the font (found here), and the audio that I sourced, all other features and functionalities were implemented by myself.
So, given this prototype, I knew that I wanted to stick with primitive shapes, and my mind immediately went to an infinite challenge game with different abilities. However, I first focused on building the menu system, featuring a simple-looking menu boasting a load-game screen, options screen, how-to-play guide and credits display. I created prefabs for what would be the most commonly used elements (buttons, panels etc.) within the project, so that the game’s interfaces would look and behave consistently throughout. This then made developing the interfaces within the game scene a fair bit easier (although the scripting, while fun, proved challenging at times!).
Early on in the game’s development I had a rough outline of what each ability would be and how it would behave. I left the implementation of these abilities to the end however, as having a large selection wasn’t as important as the other technical elements of the game. This did mean that I had to cut three of my less-exciting planned abilities, but it did allow me to polish the other six.
Overall, although there are a few areas that I would have loved to flesh-out a bit more, I am proud of this game and enjoyed working in the Unity Engine for a full project. One idea that I would have loved to add, for example, was room for more creative forms of customisation in the game, such as changing your ship’s colour or adding coloured engine-trails. These things, amongst others, strayed a little too far from the assignment brief though, so I decided against them. I may yet come back to this project, as it was rather enjoyable to work on, and if I do I will hopefully remember to share my progress here!
Thanks for reading!
Joseph MacLauchlan
Joseph MacLauchlan 