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Senior Projects: Postmortem

Projects Overview

Before starting a deeper analysis of my progress in the last academic year I think it’s important to look at a rough timeline of the period.

The intention of the year was to work on one project for the entire duration, so how did I end up starting over so much? Well, let’s take a closer look at each project and see what the important factors were.


Project Cardinal

This was meant to be a fusion between Tron and Ikaruga, a multiplayer battle royale where you won by controlling the game space. Details can be found in the development blog (LINK), but taking some time away from the project helped me realise that, as keen as I was when starting the project, my drive had petered out over the course of creating it and I had no real motivation to work on it further.

During the ideation process at the beginning of September, I actually had two other ideas, both of which were intended to be played in VR. One involved speed-eating like in the minigame in Pokémon Stadium and added Sims-style needs management, which frankly, at the time of pitching, I knew wasn’t that strong an idea. The third, however, I was quite keen on. It was a hybrid of Overcooked’s order-fulfilment gameplay with the mechanics of Fruit Ninja, casting the player as the proprietor of a skewer booth frantically stabbing the correct item combinations ordered by their customers. But, owing to a shortage in workstations with VR capabilities (we had one on campus) and seeing that a classmate was set on doing a VR project of their own, I figured I’d make things easier for everyone and work on a screen-based game.

Despite eventually dropping Project Cardinal, I’m still glad I worked on it. While I would have used the built-in networking solution in Unity, the engine was in the middle of an overhaul, so I ended up using a third-party system (Photon Bolt) and learning a lot about the intricacies of multiplayer games. I also got to leverage the lessons I’d learned in my VFX classes to quickly create prototype visuals.


Project Asymptote

So, with what I’d learned over the first term (Sept-Nov 2019), I figured I’d be a little more selfish on my next project. Thinking back, I could have started working on my VR skewer game. However, I didn’t have access to the VR workstation, and I was itching to get started to make up for the lost time.

However, part of my design philosophy is that, if a project is set in VR, it needs to use its aspects to the fullest – meaning that the experience would be different if played via other means. Thus, I needed a project whose foundations could be designed for keyboard/mouse but transitioned to a VR controller easily.

Another belief I have in designing games is that there should be something about the game that is unique, whether that be through story, style or mechanics. After all, why bother making a game that already exists? I had these factors in mind when considering my next project.

I can’t really remember where I got my inspiration from, but like many ideas it came out of the blue: a first-person VR shooter with bullet-curving mechanics à la movie Wanted. In essence, a more arcade-y take on the VR shooter genre. With the exception of the Wanted tie-in game and, arguably, the Smart Pistol from Titanfall, it seemed to be a pretty unique idea to me. I could also prototype it using mouse movement to dictate the curve, which could later be replaced by the movement of the VR controller.

Over the few months that I worked on the project, I got to grips with using the SteamVR plugin for Unity and designing a project for VR in general. Everything was going well until the pandemic.

With the closure of campus for the foreseeable future, my access to the VR workstation would again be at an end. While I could order my own set, the announcement of Half Life: Alyx meant a much shorter supply – I wouldn’t know if and when I could have a set delivered. Given that I’d not worked that long on this VR project I decided the best approach would be to once again start anew.


Project Gacha

You can read more about the motivations for the game on its page (LINK), but in essence it satirises mobile gacha games while also showing that I am capable of making them myself. It’s also meant to be a more strategic, decision-based game rather than a reaction-based one. Of all the projects I’ve mentioned so far, if I could start over from September, I would definitely choose this one, because its existence is beyond just “it’s fun” and carries a message beyond the gameplay.

Whenever I start a project I make it a point to try something new. For this gacha project, I started in the preproduction stage, using Adobe XD to plan out my gacha UI. While I eventually scrapped the idea of a vertical gacha game, learning the software – and more importantly, the method – will be handy in the future. In terms of production, I learned how to code beyond in-game events and have the engine do the repetitive work of, for instance, creating all the character prefabs that I’d written in an Excel sheet, or automatically populating an array of said character prefabs.


Lessons learned

Stuff that went well

- Broadening of skills, e.g. multiplayer, VR, XD

- Creating a project with a greater purpose than just a game

- Importance of preproduction and planning

- Use projection mapping to avoid having to spend too much time UVing where appropriate

- Flexibility in approach – knowing when to cut your losses vs powering through

Stuff learned the hard way

- Modelling takes more time than you’d think

- Designing UI is much more complicated than at first glance

- Test, test, test – when porting things from one software to the next, always do a test run before committing fully (e.g. Substance Painter to URP)

- Prototype rapidly – it’s the best way to see if a project has legs or not

- Never assume things will be fine – always have a backup plan and don’t get tied to one solution

- If you’re going to have a timetable solution (Excel/Trello), actually spend time filling it in after each session


Moving forward

With two weeks left before the final deadline, what can I do to try and push the project to completion? Here is a list of things that need finishing:

- All audio

- Some UI

- Rewriting code to fit the new UI system

- Game title/logo

- An actual ending

Can I get this done in two weeks? Definitely. What about things I’d like to implement?

- Weekly events system

- New game+ system

Can I get both done? Unlikely. Of the two, my instinct is that the second option would take significantly less time – I’d need to create a system to keep track of upgrades, and adjust starting values for each subsequent run, which is not too complicated. For the weekly events system I’d need to first come up with a bunch of event ideas and then have them affect the in-game variables accordingly. This would likely mean another Excel chart with a bunch of modifications to process, not to mention making the UI reflect these accordingly.

Yet any aspirations for strategy that I have for the game are shot if the weekly events don’t exist – with numbers that don’t change, there will be a definitive “optimal” way to play the game, which would mean the loss of any player agency. Perhaps that makes for a strong argument, but I do want to have actual engaging gameplay under my name – the idea of a gacha satire is message enough, I feel.

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