Escape from Dimension 67 Post Mortem
For the second prototyping session in my studio unit, our brief was to produce a game prototype while adhering to some creative limitations over a five week period. After being placed into teams, we were asked as a group what our favourite genres were, before being prohibited from doing them. Added to our restrictions was the absence of any text whatsoever excluding menus and only being permitted to hand the project over as a web game. As Unity was already our engine of choice for its rapid development abilities, delivering the game for the web would be no issue.
As part of my choice to pursue the field of engine programming, I stated clearing in the beginning that this would be my area of focus through the duration of the project. This tied in well with the other programmer on our team as he favored gameplay programming and already wished to handle tasks such as player interaction and enemy AI. Although we were using Unity, I still felt as though I had a good degree of flexibility when it came to coding the framework for what we ended up producing. The project was also a good opportunity for me to test my terrain generation tool in a collaborative project.
The game that we had in mind originally was horror themed, revolved around the idea of being stranded on a deserted island in another dimension and having to escape. Despite the title "Escape from Dimension 67", the project changed vastly during its development and the island is perhaps the only remnant of the original concept. Aside from taking slightly longer to lock down and having to update the documentation accordingly, these changes were primarily positive. A strong focus was placed on exploration and the new theme that the game took on, heavily inspired by Proteus.
Our goal vision was a procedurally generated world that could be freely traversed and interacted with, I feel one of the most significant events was having to resort to a lesser goal given the time that we had left. The level in the project ended up static and quite small, but made good use of my terrain generation tool nonetheless. Most of the planned interaction was minimal and it wasn't until after during a presentation of the project that we gained more of a solid insight into what would have worked. A moment in which we all released the importance of playtesting. Most of our efforts were placed on the visual aesthetics of the game, which I believe we excelled at given the feedback received.
Our production methods reflect that of Scrum, which I am finding works very well for rapid prototyping and suits me particularly well. Regularly having a list of allocated tasks to complete before moving on to another set, or "sprinting" has been very effective for myself as I continue to hone my time management skills. The allocation of roles could have used some improvement, I found we were often switching roles and completing different tasks than what was often originally set out. Although this was fine in regards to broadening our skills, not knowing who was doing what early on may have cost us some time.
I initially set out constructing a framework for the game consisting of scripts that I had written previously, which I now include in almost any new project of mine for handling tasks such as state management, text and player control. Among these was my terrain script and although not all scripts ended up being used in the final deliverable, most did aid with certain tasks during development. Game related functionally contributed by myself was very environment driven, such features include day and night cycling, weather, procedural vegetation and collision handling. Using Git to manage our repository went exceptionally well, I can only recall having to manually merge sections of the project twice at most during simultaneous development.
Destructible and dynamically textured terrain was also experimented with during development but scrapped in the final, as features that were no longer part of our design. I also contributed some primitive atmospheric art including the sun, moon, clouds and lightning bolts. Our artist did an amazing job, as did our other programmer with the AI. Our answer to the no text limitation consisted of a symbolic representation of the torch and its remaining power supply with a hand for simple interactions with the world, such as the destruction of trees.
Here is a link to the delivered Unity web build. I recommend reading some interesting posts by our artist, with insights into the development of the game from his perspective.
As part of my choice to pursue the field of engine programming, I stated clearing in the beginning that this would be my area of focus through the duration of the project. This tied in well with the other programmer on our team as he favored gameplay programming and already wished to handle tasks such as player interaction and enemy AI. Although we were using Unity, I still felt as though I had a good degree of flexibility when it came to coding the framework for what we ended up producing. The project was also a good opportunity for me to test my terrain generation tool in a collaborative project.
The game that we had in mind originally was horror themed, revolved around the idea of being stranded on a deserted island in another dimension and having to escape. Despite the title "Escape from Dimension 67", the project changed vastly during its development and the island is perhaps the only remnant of the original concept. Aside from taking slightly longer to lock down and having to update the documentation accordingly, these changes were primarily positive. A strong focus was placed on exploration and the new theme that the game took on, heavily inspired by Proteus.
Our goal vision was a procedurally generated world that could be freely traversed and interacted with, I feel one of the most significant events was having to resort to a lesser goal given the time that we had left. The level in the project ended up static and quite small, but made good use of my terrain generation tool nonetheless. Most of the planned interaction was minimal and it wasn't until after during a presentation of the project that we gained more of a solid insight into what would have worked. A moment in which we all released the importance of playtesting. Most of our efforts were placed on the visual aesthetics of the game, which I believe we excelled at given the feedback received.
Our production methods reflect that of Scrum, which I am finding works very well for rapid prototyping and suits me particularly well. Regularly having a list of allocated tasks to complete before moving on to another set, or "sprinting" has been very effective for myself as I continue to hone my time management skills. The allocation of roles could have used some improvement, I found we were often switching roles and completing different tasks than what was often originally set out. Although this was fine in regards to broadening our skills, not knowing who was doing what early on may have cost us some time.
I initially set out constructing a framework for the game consisting of scripts that I had written previously, which I now include in almost any new project of mine for handling tasks such as state management, text and player control. Among these was my terrain script and although not all scripts ended up being used in the final deliverable, most did aid with certain tasks during development. Game related functionally contributed by myself was very environment driven, such features include day and night cycling, weather, procedural vegetation and collision handling. Using Git to manage our repository went exceptionally well, I can only recall having to manually merge sections of the project twice at most during simultaneous development.
Destructible and dynamically textured terrain was also experimented with during development but scrapped in the final, as features that were no longer part of our design. I also contributed some primitive atmospheric art including the sun, moon, clouds and lightning bolts. Our artist did an amazing job, as did our other programmer with the AI. Our answer to the no text limitation consisted of a symbolic representation of the torch and its remaining power supply with a hand for simple interactions with the world, such as the destruction of trees.
Here is a link to the delivered Unity web build. I recommend reading some interesting posts by our artist, with insights into the development of the game from his perspective.
Comments
Post a Comment