Astrolothree

Role

Programmer, Game Designer, and Project Lead

Team

Dylan T Moss, Jonica Brooks, Silvano Gallegos

Background

We made Astrothree for a week long game jam hosted by SGDA during the spring semester of 2021 with the theme: "Rule of Three". The team consisted of my roommate and two people that I had never met, and it was all done virtually. I was the only one with prior game development experience and ended up leading the team. Additionally, this was my first time working with an artist and another programmer.

Summary

We ended up making a top down wave based survival-arcade game, where the player has 3 forms and each form is more or less effective against different enemy forms. It also takes advantage of a free high-score api to keep track of high-scores over the internet.

What I Contributed

• Came up with the original idea for the game
• Created player input controls
• The high-score system implementation and scene
• Implement unity's 2D light renderer and post processing (especially seen with bloom)
• Created an emission map for the character sprite-sheet
• Created the wave-based gameplay system
• All sounds effects
• Distributed tasks to other team members

Challenges faced

As stated before, I was the only who had previous experience, so delegating tasks and making sure things are being completed in a good order took more time than expected. My teammates did amazing and I also contributed a lot, but having school during the week and also people having jobs didn't allow us to get as much done as I would've hoped for. Since many of them have never used Unity or made a game before, trying to guide them also took some time. For example, the character animation for attacking has a very small attack range, which made implementing gameplay fairly difficult.

What I Learned

I learned how nice it was to have a competent team who's skills are diverse and how important it is to communicate with them to have a good product. I also learned a lot about unity, from 2D lights and graphics to how not to organize code in a unity project. Although we got it to work, going to look back at the code does not seem like a good time. In addition I learned more about Coroutines and many other aspects about C# in Unity.

What I'm Most Proud of

Getting the bloom to work and also the online high-score system to work I think really impressed the judges to where we won a prize for "Best Technical". Additionally I think this is one of the best looking games in terms of graphics I have made.