Tunnel Run

An additional project was an Enhancement Week collaborative project with three other students. This project was completed within five days, and the team consisted of myself and another game design student, one music student and one drama student. My role in the group was mainly level design, and implementing all the other elements given to me from the others in the group. However, I had played a part in some of the other roles too. The other game design students role was to create sprites and the player movement script. With the music student creating the soundtrack and title screen music, and the drama student providing the voice acting.

Exploration

The idea of the game was to create a 2D platformer where the player had to reach the end of a level with an object chasing the player throughout the entire level. We decided that the theme of the game would be a futuristic tunnel setting, where the colour red would be prominent. The chase element created an intense experience for the player, as they would have to think about their next decisions and not move too slow within the level. The player is constantly being chased by a wall of spikes, and has to avoid other spikes, acid traps and alien monsters in order to finish the level. Additionally, as a group we had many ideas for this game. However, due to the time limit we had to settle for more simpler elements. From a personal perspective, this was the first project in which I had included a title screen. We discussed this as a group that it would be one of the last elements we include in the game, as we expected it to be simple. Yet we had more pressing matters to attend to.

Challenges

I would argue that working in a team on a collaborative project can sometimes pose its own challenge. For example, each person in the group would work at different paces with deadlines to be met. However, each person would need to work at a quicker pace than usual in order to meet these deadlines. I found that in this group, while overall the experience was a good experience there was one instance where a deadline was not met and the game was slightly behind schedule. However, the game was still finished on time on the day of the showcase event, and this brings me to the next challenge.

On the day of building the game, it was discovered that the chase element of the project had disappeared. As I was play testing, I had found that the spike wall was not moving towards the player, which removed the intense experience. This led to me being confused as the game was perfectly working within Unity, but not after the game had been built. I quickly decided to ask for assistance as this was around four hours before the showcase event. After around 10 minutes of finding this bug, it was found that the spike wall was not looking for the correct object to move to. In theory, this bug should have already prevented the spike wall from moving in Unity. However, this was not the case. The bug was fixed and the game was correctly working after being built.

One new script which I encountered during this project was being able to pause audio on the title screen. When I was creating the title screen, I tested the title screen music and also the music on the how to play screen. However, once the play button was pressed the title screen music and the gameplay music were both playing simultaneously. This script paused the title screen audio, so that only the gameplay music was playing. Additionally, this script references the “scr_TitleBGMusic” script, which included the instance of the main background music. This was an interesting piece of code for me, as I intend to incorporate this feature into future projects.

Unity Strengths and Weaknesses

From experience, I would argue that a major weakness of the Unity Engine are bugs which show after a project has been built. Mentioned above, about how a bug appeared after building the game, I believe that the bug should have shown in the Unity interface, instead of after the game had been built. In a larger project, this bug could potentially ruin a game if not play tested correctly, as in this instance I was lucky enough to be working on a small project, and able to discover the bug quickly.

I believe Unity’s animation system to be a strength of the engine. It allows the user to create fluid animations which can transition very smoothly into other animations, and allow the user to give a character a personality. Although, there is some scripting required to allow the animations to work, in which the user may have to research beforehand.

Additional Research

For this project we wanted to include a title screen, instead of the game starting straight away. For this feature, I needed to research how to do this. I found video tutorials, which explained how to create a title screen, and also pause the title screen music once the player had pressed play (Learn Everything Fast, 2017; BMo, 2020).

References

BMo (2020) 5 Minute MAIN MENU Unity Tutorial [Video]. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GWjA6dixV4&ab_channel=BMo [Accessed 11/11/2021].

Learn Everything Fast (2017) Audio or Music to Continue Playing Between Scene Changes – Unity3D [Video]. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82Mn8v55nr0&ab_channel=LearnEverythingFast [Accessed 11/11/2021].

Please click the link to play Tunnel Run – https://nathan1230.itch.io/tunnelrun