About The Game

This was a solo project I started in the summer going into my junior year of college, for this game my goal was to make everything on my own and tell the story I wanted to. I did succeed in both, I made all the models, scripts, ui, etc… The only thing I did not create was the grass, the music and the skybox. This was a great experience as I had to learn about all aspects of game development which will has made me a better game developer. This is a story driven mini game collection, where you must reach certain scores to complete them and get diaries. Once you collect all four diaries you can talk to a new npc that has spawned. This was shown at the Midwest Gaming Classic and the MAGD Expo, and I got a lot of good feedback from players.

The initial concept art for the game and the hub world. I pictured having many spirits in the game and having the player be a raindrop spirit, that in the initial script for the game reflected the mood of the character. The initial story of the game was to teach how to love yourself however the story would change slightly to match the target audience of kids.

This is the hub world for the prototype of the game, that was shown at MGC. With this set up many players had trouble knowing the controls of the game and what to do thus I had some changes to make.

What I Worked On

As I said I worked on this project totally on my own and created everything in the game besides the sky box, the buttons, the music and the grass. I started by first trying to get the idea in my head to paper so I could visualize what I wanted for the game. After that I started planning out how I wanted to make the actually game play and what mini games I want to include. After planning everything I began by creating all the scripts I needed to have the gameplay down. After I started working on my models and creating the environment for all the games and levels. After having everything in the game I started looking for assets that I did not want to make since I was running out of time with school. I had a working product that I showed at the Midwest Gaming Classic and seeing people play it allowed me to make a lot of great changes to the game in time for the MAGD expo.

What I learned

Through this project I learned so much, before this project I was not really comfortable making games, I was only somewhat confident in my programming ability but nothing else. After working on this project for a summer I became really confident in my game design ability. I learned a lot about making models as this was my first time using blender and making models for a game. This was my first time messing with post processing and lighting in unity and after working with it for a little bit and I had a very basic understanding of how they work. Finally the biggest thing I learned was how each part of game development works and how you should plan out making a game. For example how the art all needs to fit into one style, as well as the music, and how you must use scripts to effectively use the art and music in your game. This was a solo project but with this experience I know have a basic understanding of all elements and feel very comfortable leading a game project.

The final hub world for the game, there was a lot of changes after I showed this off at MGC. I added in UI to help direct the player and let them know the controls. Also I placed the characters differently so the player will be drawn to the games that players liked more.