Severed Space
ROLE
Game Designer / Unity Dev
Overview
Overall my goal here was to create a two player game where players complete actions to help each other along separate paths. The game focuses on non-verbal communication across spaces, with players being limited to the tools provided by the game.
Due to the inexperience with many of the components that were present within this piece, such as Unity, Javascript, and 3D modelling, many concerns were raised. Essentially, we had to take it upon ourselves to learn almost every part of the creation of the piece from scratch as we worked to achieve the final product. Throughout the weeks prior to the final critique, there was an ever growing concern that we would not be able to handle a few of the components due to this inexperience, especially in regards to the networking aspect, as a serious knowledge of javascript and the way netcode works would be required in order to pull it off in any way beyond the amateur. Possibly the greatest concern that was present during the final critique was the oversight of the relationship of our door objects, which were reliant on the in-engine time, and the lag present on the Ryerson network. This greatly affected the way the doors worked and almost completely ruined the puzzles. Despite all the concerns and frustrations, it is safe to say that this project brought forth a great deal of valuable knowledge and experience for both of us, and is something we wish to explore again in the future, especially now that a somewhat basic understanding is present in us.
While the coding and scripting that the game required was an equally combined effort between Tim and I, my primary contribution were the art assets. After the initial drafting and design stages that I sketched out, I did my best to recreate them in 3D using the modelling software called 3DS Max. Animations and textures were also created using 3DS Max, and once that was finished, all assets were brought over to Unity, where both Tim and I could use to begin laying out the final product. Now, since 3D modelling was an entirely new concept to me at the beginning of this project, I learned a great deal in the making of this work. It provided me with quite a lot of valuable knowledge on the matter, in terms of 3D modelling itself, rigging, animating, and texturing, as well as all the hardships that come with it. Besides the art, I was required to take what I knew about Processing and dive into other programming languages, as Unity uses both Javascript and C# for scripting. We primarily used Javascript for most of the scripting, but at times resorted to C# to achieve what we wanted, so a fair bit of time was spent learning the ins and outs of these two languages. To me, the experience and knowledge I gained is the most valuable part of this work, as I now am very interested and eager to continue doing more work with 3D modelling in the future. If I were to do this again, which I do plan to, I hope to spend quite a significantly larger amount of time to really focus on the details of the art assets and push myself to create something more visually interesting.
YEAR
2013
GENRE
Co-op Puzzle
PLATFORM
PC
Engine
Unity3D