HiveGrind
Project Description:
This project was the result of a week-long game jam hosted by the Student Game Developer Alliance (SGDA). I worked with a team of 2 talented artists, one other programmer, and a sound designer to plan, design, develop, and publish this sidescroller “beat-em-up” game in Unity, a software I had never worked with before. Unity uses scripting similar to what Unreal Engine offers, but the programming and implementation of various UI features, transitions between scenes, and object hierarchies were ideas I had to adapt to.
The game jam staff announced 2 themes on August 16th, “party games” and “game over is not the end”, and we chose the latter. Our artists came up with the concept of playing as a bee from a hive, trying to save the queen, who has been kidnapped by a very angry beetle. The bees were made to be dispensable, with very little health. This way, when the player dies, they spawn again as a different bee, to continue the fight against the boss, who retains the damage he took in previous lives.
My Role:
In this project, I focused on the background, UI, and player heath implementations. The first thing I worked on was creating a parallax script to add some depth to the multi-layer background. Then, I figured out how to add a prefab to each scene to animate transitions when the scene gets instantiated. I scripted buttons and developed main menu, game over, and epilogue scenes along with the buttons that take the player from one scene to another. I learned how to create a decrementing health bar, and attached that to the player so when the player took damage, the UI would respond to reflect that change. I made popup windows for the pause menu, controls screen, and the credits screen. Then, I added the terrain and implemented the proper colliders so that the player would have a proper surface to stand on. Lastly, I learned how to animate sprites in small clips for the reskins of the player character.
There were a lot of issues that got fixed in this project, and a big amount came from FMOD Studio, the program our audio designer used to implement sound effects when a trigger was enabled. This, along with our inexperience in using GitHub for version control, took a big part of our time during the 7 days. Since everything was scripted from scratch, there were a lot of smaller bugs that affected gameplay as well. I spent the time to read through the FMOD studio documentation, fix each GitHub merge, and think through the logic that was put into the scripting for the player character and enemy. In the end, I fixed about 16 different issues, spanning from the player not being able to damage the boss, to the UI not changing with the boss’ health, even FMOD Studio not transferring properly from MacOS over to Windows. Nevertheless, I had so much fun working with a team for the first time and putting together a project I could really be proud of.
Itch.io Page:
Quick Start Guide:
- Download the zip file from the itch.io page above
- Extract zip file to desired location
- Within the extracted folder, double click HiveGrind.exe to run
- To exit the game, press alt + f4
Credits:
Ari Mabry – Music and Sound
Luca Stubbe – Design and Programming
Janelle Mendoza – Concept and Background
Levy Lu – Concept and Character
Credit to @andersonaddo on GitHub for the camera shake plugin, can be found here: https://github.com/andersonaddo/EZ-Camera-Shake-Unity