This second project was a bold approach in several aspects. Building a 3D shooter was something seldomly dared to do at Games Academy. A shooter, in less than 6 months, in Unity, with an unexperienced crew that all had additional ’sidejobs‘ (regular GA-schooling, tests, maybe some personal life).
Well, we tried. And I am proud to say, that, even if we did not get to make the full plan, we got quite some stuff done.
We managed to build a working Alpha, for 4 players, with pad-support and a nice Deathmatch – map. And this came with quite some more problems that we did not expect having to face when we started this project.
So we got a hard hit down low in the very beginning, when our programmer basically exited school after 2 weeks into the project. And without her, we had quite a problem, for programmers are in scarce supply at Games Academy. So we worked around this issue for as long as we could, always discussing the end of the project and playing the notorious poker to arrange priorities and jobs anew.
After 4 (maybe 6) weeks without a programmer, I found Oliver via mysterious ways, he is a student of Computer Sciences at TU Darmstadt, who was willing to help us out. This was a great relief, for we were close to the end of our capabilities regarding the programming part.
So we worked hard on getting the project back on track, but still it was a hard approach. We did not get all of the things we aimed for, some USPs, weapons and animations had to be cut or did not get to be implemented.
In review, I must say, this project was the one on which I learned most. I got to work on implementing animations in Unity, did some Sound again (because no one wanted to, again), got to implement my peoples‘ skills (I found the replacement programmer and got some nice audio-announcements for the Dino Park from a good friend & former colleague, Christian ‚Raz‘ Kippelt).
Also, the Game Designers (Dino Brüning, Sew Gorski and I) had to work various roles during the production and had plenty of possibilities to bring in ideas for the setting. I wrote a short diary-like text about the setting, that we all considered to be intentionally bonkers.
In the end, we had a semi-finished project, a working (basic) Alpha and we all learned a lot about team skills, bug-finding, working under pressure and finding solutions or workarounds.
Woannerster 