Project Description

A 3D, multiplayer game about people trying to prove the existence of a deer-like, mythical creature called ‘Saeus’ by taking photos, while the creature is trying to avoid them.

What Went Right

• Lo-poly as the basic aesthetic for models. We barely got things done even with lo-poly models, so I think we made a nice choice to save time.
• I successfully made everything work with three displays, which I've never experienced before.
• The collecting mushroom mechanic for the creature we added in in the middle of the project to keep the creature moving. During play tests we realized that people who play as the creature tend to hide in a place and stop moving, which made it really hard for other players to find it.
• Models look pretty with the material. Jib did all the models and textures but at the beginning they look really dark in the scene. I made the materials emit light to solve that problem and it happened to make the creature glow, which is another thing we wanted to achieve.
• Game controls are pretty smooth.
• My personal workflow in this project feels comfortable. In this project I tried to do a part of the work everyday instead of doing a lot of stuff right before play test day/due day. I think it really released my stress and helped me become more efficient and also made me have time to run more tests and do more debugs.

What Went Wrong

• There were some difficulty in dividing jobs and it was not a team work where all three people were paying the same amount of attention to the game.
• We originally had spot lights in the scene to add some lighting effects, but I didn't manage to figure out a way to exclude the reflection light in the minimap view. As a result, we give up about the light.
• The balance of the game still need some twists. We have already adjusted the values for the cool down of the skills, duration of the skills, and the speed of the players several times. At the beginning it was too easy for the humans to win, but now we made the creature a little too powerful.
• We didn't think of the performance issue at all before the final presentation day. It was fine when we play the game in Unity, but when we built it out and showed it in class on my laptop, it became really laggy.

Future Goals

• Re-balance the game
• Spend more time on UI of the character selecting scene and also refine some UI in the playing scene
• Improve the performance
• Redo the winning scene. We originally wanted to create a winning scene for the humans that looks like a newspaper/web page that says "Breaking News! Mythical Creature Saeus Confirmed by ______ (player's name)" but we ran out of time. The current winning scene of the two humans are backup plans
• Icons for the minimap

What I Learned

Since I'm mainly in charge of programming the game, I learned a lot about coding and Unity. I learned how to do multi-display and also culling layers so that each player sees their own canvas and the minimap only shows icons but not player themselves. I also learned something about the materials because when trying to solve the issue of characters looking too dark in the scene, I played around with almost all values in the material inspector. I also improved my skill of using coroutines and personal voids. I used some in my last shmup game, but I did a lot of the coroutines too complicated. I feel like in this project I finally learned to make clear and easy to read codes that really speeds up my debug process. I also discovered the built-in function that Unity has of making an icon disappear like a clock (typical animation for cool down). Before trying to search it online to check if Unity has this function, I was fully prepared to create an animation in Photoshop/Animator, and this built-in function really saved me a lot of time.