Big Game Project
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The Big Game Project has been kicked off and we are now in full development of our next game. The Big Game Project is the final course of the 2nd year here at Uppsala University GAME department. It entails the development and showcasing of a larger scale game project which is to be displayed and judged on this year’s Gotland Game Conference. Similarly to our last game CoBots we are developing in Unity 3D and we are fully utilizing the hard lessons we’ve learned from the last project. Unity is a fairly useful engine but disregarding personal preference, pricing terms and other non-development related issues the main problem is the fair share of bugs, workarounds and non-existing features we still have to deal with (such as nested prefabs, garbage collection etc.). Proper and agile game development in Unity also heavily relies on 3rd party plugins which come with a plethora of concerns such as having to pay a hefty amount for a plugin which may or may not work correctly with your version of Unity and even then still may require restructuring of the plugin’s code. Even so Unity may prove to be the fastest development option given our timeline and previous experience with it. So about the actual game that we’re making: it’s a singleplayer first-person puzzler set underground featuring robots and mechanical (but not sci-fi) structures. The core gameplay consists of just progressing through various levels. In order to do so, several robots exists with unique mechanical abilities such as grabbing or throwing. You can then combine these robots in order to form a robot which a sort of combine mechanical ability. This is know as a ‘fusion’. You can manipulate and exploit the robots attack pattern in order to advance through a puzzle; for example, a robot may throw you across a large gap or grab a distant object for you. The game emphasises an open-ended solution where there is no single solution to a puzzle and different variants have different pros and cons. Puzzle are also not kept on a room-by-room basis, instead solving puzzles may alleviate or change certain aspects of a previous room, allowing for perhaps another option when solving a later puzzle. As such, backtracking appears frequently, but never in the sense where you have to walk back through all previous room just to get to a certain area. Instead all ‘rooms’ are interconnected (where a ‘room’ doesn’t necessarily denote a closed environment separated by a door or the like). 
Old One-Page Design (still somewhat relevant)  |