In the second part of my post on the 2018 Global Game Jam I’ll be going over the general implementation I worked on for the game.
When it comes to game engine and implementation, I love being a generalist. It allows me to facilitate others in making progress. From plugging in art for artists to hooking up scripts for programmers, each task allows me to see how the game comes together and how it functions. This allows me to better understand the game and when I make adjustments as a designer it gives me the ability to tweak a lot of things without breaking the game.
Here is an example. This is a video from part one showing the progress on my team after 12 hours.
Without having general knowledge of how different parts of the game worked, I would not have been able to rollback the game to an earlier state to capture what it looked like at that time, without breaking the game.
On Carrier, I helped with general implementation, look dev, and UI
I worked with programmers to hook up controls for the birds and create the city map.
Once that was set up, I worked to refine the look of the city with primitive cubes in Unity and post-processing.
Using a city generator script in combination with different prefabs that I created, I was able to start generating a city that felt more like a city and less like duplicated grids of cubes.
Once I was happy with the look of the city, I implemented the player prefabs. I added in the character meshes for the Hawk and the Pigeon to the player prefabs.
After the bird models were added, I attached particle emitters so the VFX artist could trigger and test different VFX in game.
The last part of implementation was creating all the UI for the game: Title Screen, Player Select, Player HUD, and Pause menu.
The advantage of being a generalist is being prepared to encounter problems in a game jam. By understanding the engine, I am able to better help my team resolve the issues that come up in development. Issues that an artist might not be able to solve but are too time consuming to have a programmer investigate. This also re-enforces the ability to debug problems on my own and understanding the ins and outs the game to modify it. In my opinion, these contribute to being a better designer, because it allows me to implement game ideas to the best of my abilities instead of relying on others to do it.
Thanks again for reading. I hope that it was interesting and useful.
Thanks again for reading. I hope that it was interesting and useful.