For the first semester in university, I had to work in a team of 6 to create a 2D mobile game. I decided to work on UI and input, which meant creating scripts for buttons and multi-directional thumb-stick, animations for the UI and even font. All was done in Unity. Most of this was a quite new experience for me as this was my first bigger project making a game in Unity and the second time I was using it to create a game.
I managed to complete the work I wanted to do, however, due to this project being the first one for team members and me the end result was not as great as we imagined it to be. Having said that there were a lot of things that I learned working using Unity and in a team.
The second semester required a team of 6 people to create a VR game or experience. A new team was formed. And we decided to try to create a horror game. We, again, used Unity as a game engine, Blender for 3D modelling and Adobe Photoshop for texturing. Every person in a team was working on their own level. It was decided to make a modular level design, as in every team member worked on their own level. It was great for all of the team members to do a little bit of everything as was required by our course. However, this resulted in a mismatch of art styles.
I worked on modelling and programming a hub level, that would give players a place to rest, try out various physics-based mechanics and select the wanted level. Also, I programmed various interaction mechanics, such as a script for level changing, pickable object interactions, usability related mechanics, such as showing in the corner of the screen buttons that are currently being pressed.
The most important thing that learned from this project was the importance of creating a level of multiple props instead of modelling the entire level by hand. I understood this lesson after spending most of my time modelling and texturing the level. Because of the amount of time I spend on the hub level I could not work on my own puzzle level, that I wanted to do. Of course, this was not the only lesson that I learned, however, it is the most memorable one.
I also have documented my first-year projects in a series of blog posts – martisantis.wordpress.com
Martynas Antipenkovas 