If you’re looking for the very first game project I ever did on my own, this will probably be it.
Why did I do this?
Theoretically, the answer to this question is quite simple… Because I had to.
During the first semester of my studies we had to develop a game in which the player goes on a Journey. But what we made of it was up to us. We learned how to create terrain, use a few assets, and simple C# scripting. With these tools and knowledge, we should get the job done. Since I myself place a lot of value on narratives, I wanted to present the journey in the form of a story.
What did I do:
What I wanted to do was very much inspired by The Beginners Guide, or as I learned after the fact, The Stanley’s Parable. I didn’t know much about C# coding at the time, so I couldn’t really include any gameplay. What I could do was trigger events. And what can be done well with that? Sound. Or voicelines.
I had the idea of creating different environments, but how do I incorporate that into the story in a way that makes sense?
While creating the environments, I wondered what would happen if people were given the ability to create worlds. We create worlds in video games but what about actual living worlds. So I wanted to tell the journey of a man who creates worlds. So far so go(o)d
I thought to myself that a person with so much power would surely go insane. I mean, people are already totally crazy when they get too much power. Don’t want to drop names but I am sure you can think of one or two people in the world right now who have too much power for being kind of unstable. A person who has so much power would surely become megalomaniac.
With the title, you can begin to imagine what became of the guy. If not, just have a look at the video or give the game a try. Certainly not my best work, but at least my own of which I am proud. You can find it on Itch.io and the video is on top of this page.
What did I learn?
Well as my first project in Unity I learned a lot about the engine itself. It’s interface, sculpting environment, basic C# Coding. A lot of some basic stuff. But there were two very important takeaways from this Game:
1. I got to know the feeling of independently bringing a project from start to finish. I have learned what interests me more and what interests me less. During my work I had mostly done what was required of me and that was often fun and sometimes it was just something that you had to do. With the project here, I could decide for myself what to focus on. That was the environment, later known as the level design and the story.
2. I learned more about interactive narratives. Surely these learnings do not show up in this game, here I had only made the mistakes to understand them. The narrative is way too fast paced. The environment doesn’t convey the story the way I wanted it to and it relies a lot on the player walking somewhere and listening to what the guy is saying. A guided tour. A bit boring. But it was a valuable experience for later projects.