Fig 1 - Join Menu
Splash was the first big project I worked on with the intent to release. It was developed in a team of 5 over 4 months for our course in game design. I was one of the two programmers on splash, the other three were all artists. The development was rocky at times but it was a good experience in team work during a more serious environment for sure.
The programming I focused on was the physics and character controls, in addition I also handled the main menu, and some more aesthetic background scripts. The character controller is were I learned the most over those 4 months finding many problems causing a total of six iterations of the script.
Fig 2 - Game Play
The character controller started with the best intentions, I had experienced quirks and falling through some meshes with unity's default controller and being interested in physics related programming I figured how hard can it be. The final outcome was spending maybe 25% to 50% of the time refining one script starting with simple capsule casts and turning into so much vector math. The final product handles slopes, sliding and walking on them, step function for hard items like stairs, sliding when running into walls, moving, and rotating with other objects movements. The list may not seem significant but to anyone who has tried to factor all this in while limiting edge cases and having the end product feel good without falling through every once in a while is a major challenge. I also learned a lot about gravity and acceleration being dependent on having a stable calculation frame or else it will never quite be perfectly frame independent.
In addition to that I worked on some small things like clouds, seagulls in the sky, a clock tower. They were always nice breaks in between bouts of adjusting the character controller. The menu I think also turned out pretty intuitive which was harder than I thought when considering all 4 players input at once.
Over all knowing what I know now this project could have gone smoother but in the end I am proud of what our team accomplished.
Get the build here
