Game Portfolio of av23dev

About

Autumn Giant was a 48 hour game jam submission that was worked on by 4 members including myself. I was one of the lead programmers and the lead modeller for the game. The project was made in C# / Unity.

I decided to join the game jam in order to gain experience working on a game as a team. I have a better understanding of the workflow between artists and other programmers now as well as how a VR game works. I also gained experience using version control to collaborate.

Important Points

• You play as a giant picking up resources to help a village survive the winter
• Emphasis on picking up objects with VR controllers
• Pick up trees and animals for wood and food. Squeeze clouds to collect water
• I worked on NPC AI, resource collection scripts and triggers, and general object collision

Details

Working With a Team

The team consisted of an artist, a sound designer, project manager/programmer, and me: a programmer and 3D modeller.

Our team communicated mainly through Discord. We shared files using Unity Version Control, this developer tool uses methods such as push and pull.

We kept clear communications on where we were on the project. I played the role of the 3D modeller and one of the lead programmers. I was able to collaborate successfully with the other programmer on the team to create the logic of the game.

Script Interaction

This game is heavily reliant on scripts communicating with each other. Objects such as trees that fall into collection bins need to be checked correctly and the score must be recorded correctly in a manager.

One of more challenging scripts was the water collection. You need to hold a cloud over a bucket to fill it with water. The bucket detects if a cloud is above it, but it also needs to get the script to check if it is being held.

Gameplay Details

Players need to collect resources for a village to prepare it for the coming winter. They need to gather wood, food, and water. If the player does not collect enough resources the village will fail to survive.

Trees are scattered throughout the map randomly and the player needs to pick them up and put them in a pile to collect wood. Roaming pigs walk around the map and the player needs to pick them up and put them in a pen to collect food. Clouds float by and players need to grab them and hover the cloud over a bucket to collect water.

Biggest Challenges

One of the biggest hurdles that the team ran into was using Unity Version Control. I was the one that had to set up version control and I needed to dig into the documentation to learn how to set it all up.

Another problem with version control was that one of the pushes accidentally changed some VR files and that broke the functionality of the VR aspect. We then shortly learned about the concept of ignore files. We were able to successfully rollback the game to a previous version to restore functionality.