Here you can see what I spent most of my time on. You can click on the image above to play the game. This is only the first level of the game, we plan to have three more levels after this. If you look below, you can see the concept arts and music and themes for the next two levels. The original ending of the game was supposed to question the ethics of the player in the ending will be different depending on how many enemies the player killed and how many health the player has at the end. From the end, the player can replay the game to reflect on the choices they made in the game to get different endings.
Here are the two background musics for level 2 and level 3. Below are some of the sprites and layouts for the next few levels.
When it comes to any Freestyle project, it always seemed to me that the work is not as good as I anticipated to be. However, each time I turn in an unsatisfied work, I want to work on a even harder project. For my innovator project, I initially wanted to research around music, something like to make an album of original sound tracks for a story. Later on, as I saw the suggestion list of innovator projects, I end up deciding on making a game with Sumukh using Unity. Sumukh and I had always wanted to make a game of our own. During our sophomore year when took the AP Computer Science class, we attempted to create a game already, However, we didn’t end up finishing the game in the bugs that complied up was too hard to fix. This time, I thought it would be a great opportunity to revisit the ambition using a better platform
During my research phase, I spent a lot of time looking around the impact of video games in our society for the research paper. This helped me realize the margin of the game that I should make with a story and gameplay that could make the player think about an ethical problem in our society. In this case, the game is about making in-game decisions that could impact the outcome of the game. Furthermore, I talked to some game designers about how to make an engaging game that could let the players be more interested in the game. One such advice that I took was to create background music and sound effects that matches with in-game experience. Lastly, the most extensive research I did on was how to use the Unity software. Even though that we had previous experience in coding in Java, coding in C-Sharp is much different than what we had known. Our innovator project is made up of many little games that we previously tested. Watching video tutorials on Unity helped me to understand the software I was supposed to work on. However, because of how we rushed the whole game as little components of test games that I made earlier, the lack of extensive research would backfire on us later on.
The innovator project was a collaboration with my classmate. We both split the work to parts that we are good at. I was assigned to work on the background music, game graphic and the menu system, and Sumukh was assigned to work on the player and the ai controls and interactions. Initially, our collaboration was pretty successful as we were just working on our individual parts of the game. However, as we approach the part where we combine our works together, we ran into many difficulties with the code. This is mostly the problem with communication as we can’t both work on the same project at the same time. Therefore, we had a hard time trying to combine our code together. Furthermore, we struggle in trying to get a animation work as we moved from animation of the test sprites to the final animation sprites.
If we could do the project over, we would had tried to plan out the communication better between me and Sumukh. I would had set up a better sharing system instead of just work in the WebAudio room. I would also had allocated more time on research than just doing little games that builds up to the final game because that would insure that the project will have less bugs later on the project.
The 21 century skill that I improved upon on the most was self direction, because I was able to set up a through plan for everything that needs to be done. I also managed to follow most of what I set out to do during the research phase. In skill that I improved upon the least was high productivity because I was not able to allocate the best time spent on research and implemented in my project. Some of the research I did was not implemented to the game because of incompatibility with other codes.
The learning experience that I got from this project can be applied to the future is how important research is to creating something that is ultimately successful. The skills I learned from Unity can help me later in creating more games. I felt somewhat bittersweet about my innovator project. One side I’m happy that I was able to create a game which is what I always wanted. I halso felt sad that I my project was a lot harder than what I expected. I greatly value this project as it allowed me to learn about Unity and to be resourceful with the tools given to create as much as possible.
