LIST
UNITY, BAKED LIGHTING, REFLECTION PROBES, GAME JAM COMPETITION
A collaboration with Dylan Avendano, Austin Hare, Janine Ibrahim, and Kettako
BACKGROUND
Our team of five made List, a first person 3D puzzle game created for Mini Jam 65 on itch.io for the theme, ‘Abandoned’. The player is given 5 minutes to locate all items on the list provided by searching through an obstacle laden grocery store.
PROJECT GOALS
Our main goal was to create a completed game within our 3-day deadline. We sought to utilize our various skills to create a cohesive and functioning product. I wanted to apply my programming, Unity, and general game development skills to this project, specializing in gameplay and design.
PROCESS
Being the only engineer on the team, I spent our ideation phase helping to temper expectations and keep our scope creep in check. After creating our concept and roughing out a list of features and assets, we set out on the production of our game.
My primary focus was on creating the gameplay through Unity and C# and building the scene with the assets handed to me by the artists on our team. I would also help critique them toward something more usable in the game if they weren’t completely game-ready (e.g. reduction in polygons, smaller textures, or better export settings from Maya or Blender).
Additionally, this product was an opportunity to learn Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline and some advanced graphical features like baked lighting and reflection probes. Though the baked lighting proved difficult due to some of the meshes’ export settings, I was able to get it into a usable state and create a realistic end result.
UI / UX
The top left of the UI [1] shows your shopping list, i.e. the items that you need to grab before heading to the cash register. It can be closed with the ‘Tab’ key. The bottom right of the UI [2] shows a ghost of the items that you have yet to pick up and the items that you have already picked up. These elements were placed away from the center of the screen to prioritize the player’s exploration of the space while allowing them to break their focus and look at their progress.
To help player accessibility and potential motion-sickness, the Options menu [4] (opened by pressing the ‘O’ key [3]) allows the player to change the volume and how horizontally and vertically sensitive the camera’s movement is with respect to their mouse.
TAKEAWAYS
In the end, this project proved to be a great exercise in interdisciplinary team work which helped me to improve my communication skills with non-engineer developers. It also helped to familiarize myself with baking lighting and reflections to still have fantastic looking, realistic environments without the overhead of realtime physics based lighting like raytracing.
I’m proud of what we accomplished in a short amount of time.
CREDITS
Dylan Avendano: 3D Modeler, Texture Artist, Story Concept (Maya)
Austin Hare: 3D Artist, Game Design, Project Manager (Blender)
Janine Ibrahim: Graphic Design and Image Textures (Adobe Photoshop, Procreate)
Kettako: Music and Sound Design (Sibelius/Ableton)
Richard Pittman: Programmer and Unity Dev, Game Design