Boxing With Unity
21 Jan 2020
In my fall 2020 semester at UH Manoa, I had participated in a game jam called the Beginner’s Circle Jam, where beginners at Unity create a game completely from scratch. To preface why I joined the coding competition despite being totally new to Unity, I wanted to do a summer internship at Riot Games and wanted to bulk up my resume just a little. There also just so happend to be a couple of my peers with the same interest so I went ahead and started a group for it.
The Learning Challenge
So one of the major challenges when taking part in a game jam competition is trying to bridge the gap between what all of my members know and how I can fully utilize their abilities. All of us were very new to Unity, with me standing as the one with the most expertise at 1 month of training. But I think it was enough to get a full game up and running. I had also thought and guided some of my peers when they were stuck. But we were all assigned a level to do and a puzzle to make. Overall, on the coding side I think that everything went pretty well in terms of coding in C# and using the Unity Engine.
The Artistic Production Curve
One of our major problems was creating art for the game, and because none of us were artists, I took on the responsibility of creating art for the game since I was the only one with art experience. Albeit, my art experience does not go very far, but I was able to make all the art that was used as assets and general splash arts throughout the game. However, it was pretty hard to be satisfied with. However, it was also the time constraints that stopped me from fleshing out the art, so basically all we had for models were blocks throughout the game.
Definitely, next time, me and my team will find someone to do art if we can. It might not be possible though because we do not know anyone who is willing enough to do the art for free, nor someone who feels confident enough to make the art
The Actual Challenge
After all the hard work to make the base of the game, the game was too short. Me and my team were so shocked by the amount of time it actually takes to complete the game despite the hours of work put into developing the game. Therefore, me and my team made small attempts into extending the game, however that also took up a bunch of time for debugging since we were not very familiar with C#. However, we got everything to work just nicely and submitted the game before the deadline.
The Results
We did not win anything from the game jam since we did not place very high, however it was an enthrilling experience that I would like to do again one day. In comparison to other games that were submitted for this game jam, I definitely saw the art differences between my team’s project and theirs. However, I looked through some of the winning games and I saw that most of the games were made using Unity so I dissected their games and attempting to understand how they coded their games.