My First Game

This was my first project I worked on during my journey in learning to develop games. During my time at university, of which I am still in attendance, we were tasked to design a game with a focus on code. Although this was the case I still wanted to make an effort to add somewhat of a design to my game. The project I chose to do was a city builder type game based heavily on inspiration from the tv series and film Snowpiercer.

My first step was to develop my understanding of the, at the time, experimental NavMeshAgent tool in Unity. I wanted to attempt to use this tool as we had been learning about it in university at it seemed to be something that could be very useful to know moving forward. However, for this game it was a slight overcomplication to the coding process due to the simple straight lined movement of the train. In fact it produced many bugs within the game as I attempted to make carriages follow the carriage in front of them with the lead carriage moving from waypoint to waypoint. The carriages would bump into each other when they shouldn’t and veer off track. This now is controlled by a line of code that resets their path if they get too close however this fix is not indestructible.

An important aspect of this game for me was to add somewhat of a story to the campaign. I created characters in photoshop and devised a story where the player gets to make choices that would impact how happy different classes are. This function was relatively easy to implement and has an affect of which class the player sides with in the war at the end of the game.

One of my favourite features of this project are the multiple cameras attached to the train. I wanted to add different cinematic angles that the player could look at their train as they slowly built and improved it. This, at first, was a little tricky to implement. However, in the end it was as simple as having the cameras in an array and iterating through it.

As much as I am proud of this project and all I learned from it. The code is greatly inefficient. There are multiple scripts that could be compressed into less scripts. The building mechanic could be improved as currently there is only one set order you have to build the carriages in. And also in regards to the building mechanic, in this game only the colour of the carriages change. Instead it may have been easy to implement a feature to where the carriages can be set active making them look as though they have been built to the player.

Some future improvements would be to enhance the environment the train moves through, create some 3D models of the train and carriages and potentially some interiors also. As a whole I learnt a lot from this project that I took forward into my next projects.