Your Descendants’ Descendants
Even Death won't stop this Family!
Overview:
Your Descendants’ Descendants is a 3D collect-a-thon game, where the player must run around the map, earn money, collect mission items, and bring them home. As the game progresses, the player becomes older and older, which affects gameplay. Once the player dies, the player respawns as a youngling and the cycle repeats.
Your Descendants’ Descendants was a solo project made for the Game Design 3 at Howest: Digital Arts and Entertainment. Students of the class were tasked to spend 10 hours a week to make a vertical slice of a tested prototype for a game.
In total, around 60 hours were spent on the game over the course of six weeks.
My Work:
Brainstorm, Game Design, and Prototyping
Programming (UI and Gameplay)
Implement Animations and SFX
General Info:
Your Descendants’ Descendants was the first project I worked on solo, and thus the first time I really had to tackle topics such as animations, music and sound, 3D worldbuilding, and more.
The project was split over six weeks, working 10 hours per week, to create the game. The first two weeks were spent brainstorming, prototyping, and playtesting. The next three weeks were spent producing the game. The final week was spent polishing the game.
Brainstorming:
As one of the main focuses for Game Design 3 was about prototyping and brainstorming, 20 hours were spent Brainstorming and Prototyping the game.
The themes for this game were “Keep it alive” and “Only one enemy.”
Over the course of the course, I became very proficient in coming up with many varied and unique ideas that slowly narrowed down into more concrete and solid ideas.
It was thanks to this course that I found that I really enjoyed the brainstorming process, coming up with many ideas and concepts just from the smallest spark of inspiration.
To see how thorough my brainstorming and selection process was, feel free to check out my Miro Board.
Prototyping:
One of the most important things I learned during this class is that Paper Prototypes are a very powerful tool and should not be underestimated.
Prototypes in a game engine are useful, but I was able to make more thorough and understandable prototypes on paper in a shorter time, than I could with Unity. This helped me easily playtest and convey the main gameplay to playtesters, which made it easier to get more useful feedback.
Development:
After two weeks of prototyping and brainstorming, we moved on to three weeks of production and one week of polish, with 10 hours of work done each week.
I took the development process I learned from Heartbeat and Save our Senior and applied it to this game, which allowed me to quickly code in the core gameplay mechanics.
Outside of the core game loop, which I knew was fun and interesting thanks to my paper prototype, one of the key elements I wanted my game to convey was comedy.
I wanted players to laugh while playing the game from the slapstick humor the game exudes. During the development, I kept this idea of conveying humor to the player, which influenced most of my decisions.
For example, the ending screen would inform the player of how long it took you to do a very simple task, such as bake a cake. Additionally, the game would also be filled with very comical obstacles, such as banana peels, dropped flower pots that spawn from the sky, or cars.
However, one of the best ways the comedy was conveyed was when players got hit by objects. Initially, the player being launched in a random direction when getting hit was a bug. I had the temptation to try and fix the bug, but I soon realized that it was perfect for my game and really helped to convey the comedic tone of the game. It just goes to show how even bugs can help improve games and not be afraid to adapt to unexpected developments!
Finally, I also became more proficient in other areas that I didn’t have a chance to work on during my previous projects, namely animations and sound effects. I got familiarized with Mixamo and Unity’s animation system, as well as how to play sound effects. It may sound simple, but it was exciting for me since this was the first time I had really touched these areas!
Documentation and Pitching:
The last main focus for this course was to not only document your game well with a Game Design Document but also to give a short pitch about your game. While I had done documentation for previous projects, I didn’t have many opportunities to practice my pitching skills.
It was a useful opportunity to be able to practice my pitching skills as well as my public speaking skills.
Takeaways:
Became much more skilled in brainstorming ideas
Learned the importance of Paper Prototyping and became more inclined to utilize them in the future
Better at time management and working on projects solo
Became more skilled in Unity’s animation and SFX system
Became better at documenting and pitching my games to an audience.