Role: Sole Developer
Year: March 2023
Engine: Unity
Platform: Desktop
Target Audience: open world audience, historic audience, low poly/toon audience.
Available at: Link temporarily down.

Description:

The task set was to create a game that lasted a minimum of five minutes, had a save and load, and had some sort of gameplay loop. Otherwise the task was fairly open ended, and had 8 weeks to complete. This was a solo task. I chose the era I most enjoy which is the classical period, partly due to personal bias and partly due to having those assets available to start work with. And I chose 3D open world as I really wanted to push myself on this project.

What did I do:

• I programmed everything in the game.
• Lots of knowledge gained in Navmesh issues and design.
• The quest system.
• Got to try scriptable objects which are now in my workflow for every game since.
• The save & Load system through JSON.
• A combat system.
• Inventory and equipment system.
• All UI and art (except the buildings, items and characters which were third party).
• Created entire landmass.
• Open world game.
  
  

Challenges:

I quite enjoyed this one and it was over scoped quite significantly, as can be seen in image 3, with the focus being on one quarter of the map.
The idea was to have 4 towns in each corner of the map and a temple in the mountain (it is there but non functional), for the player to explore and do more side quest/ open world tasks.
I had issues with navmesh and trying to get the behaviour states working correctly, however I did fix it in the end, but the combat was not satisfying enough for me, I opted for a dark souls type stand still while attacking, and added a block chance for the other character, I would like to rework it some more and just make it more finessed.
The map creation had some issues, I created it in Unity, exported to blender, tweaked, and then broke it in unity due to vertice connections. I fixed it by fine tuning the vertices back in blender and evening it out to create a better simplified mesh and height maps for export.
There was still a few bugs at submission, namely: Does not save equipment status or mouse rotation status, if target is dead and someone hits again it will replay the dying animation even with 0 health, a salve/load bug sometimes happens if you delete the save manually- it tries to load but the file does not exist.
However except the last bug I figured out how to fix all of them, for the equipment and mouse I simply added them to the save and load files, for the target I just tied a boolean into the death state and stopped it replaying animation if dead. The save/load bug at the end I never figured out the issue and it is still on my white board until I do.
When making this game I originally didn’t design it for a target audience, it was more a case of wanting to stretch my skill and my brain and create a very small open world game within the window allotted. Later on I decided to target a more historical target audience with this game as I was using a Greek asset pack and it seemed to make sense, but it was a case of chasing the fun first, then figuring out who the fun was for.
Overall though I quite enjoyed this one and really got to solve some deep problems in the programming and the map design.