Week 34

Week 34:

Critical Reflection:

Conclusion:

Over the course of this college year, I have managed to design, create and test my Horror-based game “Monster Bear” using the Unity Engine. Initially, I was really unsure what to create this time around as I felt starved of any worthwhile ideas that I could use for the Unity Project. In addition, I was really unsure as to how difficult it could be or how it would eventually turn out in the end. After all, I had no prior knowledge or experience with Unity Engine.

In its current state, the Unity Game itself has most of its features that I wanted to implement into it as mentioned above. Over the year, I feel that I have gathered a lot of skills, knowledge and experience from this Unity Project, and they’ll likely prove to be invaluable. As such, I feel slightly more confident than I was in the beginning of this course. But I feel I may still need to use research sources if I ever wanted to continue using the Unity Engine in future.

Additionally, I should mention that I did run into problems and that there are still a few bugs in the game than I had intended there to be. And if I wanted to forward with this game, then it would need a lot more development and research in order to be in fully working order. Working with Unity Engine also took a lot of time and research itself to learn how it worked and sometimes it left me frustrated learning that the coding itself was out of date.

For example, when I was typing in and editing the code, I had learned from watching YouTube Tutorials I would sometimes learn that the coding itself would not work and this is because I was using older pieces of coding from earlier versions of Unreal Engine. Additionally, Unreal Engine itself gets updated almost yearly and once we had reached 2019 the coding, I was using from 2017-2018 had become now obsolete, and it was better to not even update.

It was because of issues like this, I sometimes had to either go back to an older version of Unity Engine, or somehow revise and modify the coding I had to fit the updated services. As a result, I ended up scrapping the game a few times before I eventually found the best way to implement the coding that I was using. Thanks to the steep learning curve, partly my own fault, I feel like I may have wasted more time and that I could have gotten more done.

For example, in-game I wanted to include a “stamina system” that would have caused the Player to lose stamina the more they run, and the only way to rebuild the stamina was to stop and take a breather. Of course, this would also mean any Enemy NPCs nearby would be able to spot them and chase after them. Additionally, I had also wanted to create an actual torch that requires batteries and the Player also need to collect them less they run out. As such, when it came to using Unity Engine, I found it to be a trial-and-error experience.

As for Assets, I found that Unity Engine offered a lot of free Assets that I could use and easily upload into my game. As well as tutorials as to how to use them. This was especially useful for a student like me, who is still looking for a job and has little money to spend. Any Assets or Unity Kits I ended up using, I’ll be sure to mention and link them in the appendix at the end.

Overall, however, I am relatively pleased and satirised with the results of my Unity Project. During the development, it turned out to be a much larger feat than I had realised, and I wish I could have implemented a few more features. Regardless, at this point I am confident that with a bit more development I could get the game into a more complete state. Other than that, I am very satisfied with the functionality of the coding mechanics and gameplay. As a result, this year I have learnt how to use Unity Engine and C# Scripting.