budmonde / mit-cms611-inmemoriam

In Memoriam - Unity2D Game

This Project was my third video game project I worked on for the MIT undergraduate course CMS.611: Creating Video Games in Spring 2017. The video game is a single-player 2D point-and-click adventure puzzle game.

Team members:

• Audrey Li
• Karen Fan
• Monde Duinkharjav
• Rhea Lin
• Yolanda Zhou
• Hongyi Shi
• Kyle Bridburg

Course Assignment Requirements

Goals: Create a small but fully functional and well-polished web browser game for an external client, using the project and team management techniques learnt in this class. Use design iteration techniques throughout early prototyping and focus testing to improve your ideas throughout development.

Development schedule: 7.5 weeks of fast prototyping

Requirements:

• Maximum game length: 10 minutes for a single playthrough. 
• Single Player Game or Single Screen, no-networking Multiplayer 
  • No networking components!
• Game does not rely on single use content as a key mechanic.
• The games’ art, audio, and mechanics support each other to create a unified fiction and/or aesthetic. 
• User Interface tested for legibility and usability. Significant attention played to entire user experience, as evidenced through iterative changes in design.
• Game must use & play audio for the player. 
• Thought given to spectating, non-’playing’ users: 
  • Capable of being run on a large projector screen or TV.
  • Non-playing players can understand what is going on by viewing the screen.
  • Game must be delivered as a browser game, running on Chrome. (Teams should host the game & provide a URL for project turn ins.)

Progress of the Project

As part of the assignment, we were required to upload progress builds of the game. These builds as well as the final build of the game can be found below as Unity WebGL pages.

• April 24th Build: Implemented interactables.
• April 26th Bulid: Time travel mechanic rudiments implemented (still buggy). A lot of the real in-game assets imported.
• May 5th Build: Added a lot of polish to individual scenes in the game. Individual parts work correctly. Several game breaking bugs prevent build from being playable.
• May 14th Build: Final Build for Submission.

Personal Notes

Having learned quite a bit of the Unity engine workflow in my previous two projects (linked here and here), our team had a much better understanding as to what we were doing in terms of organization of our code and assets, feasible scope of the project as well as skillset of the teammembers. We made sure to split up the responsibilities more reasonably so that less things fell through the cracks and made sure to be on top of our actionables. In retrospect, our workflow for this project eerily resembled a start-up: daily updates, scrum boards, backlogs, milestones and all sorts of other buzz-wordy things... The types of chaos that would creep up during development really put into perspective how things work in real life and I found that quite interesting. At the same time, I was also surprised how indie game development is so similar to tech start-ups.

Acknowledgements

The game was built using Unity 5.3 with C# used for scripting. All graphic art assets were made by the teammembers (Karen Fan, Rhea Lin, Yolanda Zhou, Monde Duinkharjav) using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. All fonts used in the game were either system default fonts or used from the open source font repository http://1001freefonts.com. Sound assets were used from open source sound file repositories http://zasplat.com and http://freesound.org. In the making of the game we referenced our project structure and design from the Unity Adventure Game Youtube Tutorial series released by the Unity dev team. This project source code is licensed under the MIT License.