This was supposed be posted way before December, but here we’re. SMH🤦♂️
It was a cheerful day, our teams were just formed, and I had just met Shilpita and Vividha, my new team mates and we were happy. Suddenly the sky became dark and the lightening strikes, and from the sky echoed the prophecy for the next sprint. The game devs rejoiced as the topic was gaming, that meant we had build a game as our project this time.
Story so far….
As you know by now, I’m part of MLH Fellowship Explorer track and we build new projects in like every two weeks for a longer version of hackathons called Sprints. We are teamed up in the groups of 3 to work on projects which abide by the theme of Sprints. In Sprint Two, we were supposed to build a game, and the engineering focus “Clean Code”.
This time I was teamed with Shilpita and Vividha. I was working with them for the first time. After some good discussions, we decided to go with a fantasy fiction combat game using Unity and C# and disclaimer this is something that we have never done before, and had no idea about. We also decided to meet regularly at a fixed time, since while me and Vividha are based in India, Shilpita is based in the US, so that we could stay connected and work more efficiently.
We got Unity Pro because of GitHub Student Developer Pack and we started off slow by installing Unity and familiarizing ourselves with the UI of Unity and C#. Since, this is something that we have never done before we had to give some extra push to ourselves to learn Unity and C#.
We started off with looking for assets for game and binge watching tutorials. After some healthy amount of procrastination, I picked a random character asset and started experimenting with character movements while also learning from tutorials by Brackeys(who sadly left YouTube 2020 before I even got a chance to subscribe 😦 DAMN YOU 2020).
For the next two days, we worked on finalizing game assets and worked on animating character moments for our hero and the enemies, and after some stumbling, falling and getting up again, we sort of got it right. Before our mid point demo, we had the character moments and enemy movements working nicely, and two game scenes good to go. After our mid point demo, our primary goal was to setup the final scene, add transitions to make the game look whole and in game music to make the game more fun which went smoothly thanks to the combined team efforts.
We pulled off an all nighter right before the demo (me and Vividha, timezone differences smh), trying to deploy our game on Web which for some reason just wouldn’t happen and when it did, it would crash with an error whose solution we couldn’t even find on Stack Overflow. We ended up giving up on it and went with a executable version of the game instead.
Our demo went nicely(with some minor hiccups – team Evil in Jaffar knows 😛) and even though we didn’t win, we were super proud of what we achieved in this short span of time. From our pod, Team AmongUps won the sprint, and further secured the 1st position in Global Finals, and made the whole Pod proud ❤️️
Stills from the game, anyone?
In this project, I primarily contributed in animating the characters, the game logic and physics, while my friend Shilpita worked on the transitions and animations as well as scene management for game progression and Vividha worked on the story line of the game as well as the background graphics and sound effects of the game.
Overall, it was really a fun project and I really enjoyed working with Shilpita and Vividha because of how smoothly we communicated even with the timezone difference and how we divided the work for the project.
You can checkout our profiles on GitHub for other awesome projects that we have worked on during the Fellowship and in general.
GitHub – Shilpita
GitHub – Vividha
I guess that’s my cue to disappear, bye everyone, stay safe!!
The Code Life 