Game Submission - Galactic Gaurdians

Over the past few months we have been assigned to work on a game in groups, the brief read that we had to work in teams of 3 or more and the game had to include a highscore system, flying and shooting. Our final build consisted of 27 scripts and over 1GB worth of assets over 4 different scenes with different planets. The enemy included a script which allowed it to chase the player and try to collide with it and the main player ship included a boost function with a smooth camera to follow behind the ship.

Above is a screenshot from the game showing the ship in motion, the GUI is clear and gives you information about what the ship is doing as well as your final score in the level, the main objective whilst in scenes like these is to survive as long as possible. Enemies spawn in groups of 5 every 30 seconds. We chose this amount to slowly add more enemies to the scene as time progresses making the game naturally harder as time goes on. 

Enemies have a distinctive pink trial behind them to make it easier to discover where they are, they move sightly slower than the player ship and rotate slower to make them easier to hit considering they have a tendency to try to get behind you when trying to hit you, to further make the game feel faster the enemies only need to be hit once to destroy them.

Above is a screenshot showing another variant of the level showing an earth-like planet, the score feature counts up in increments of 50 based on how many enemies you have killed. when you get back to the main menu the highscore function updates and keeps track of your score during that play session of the game. 

The main parts of the game I worked on was the modeling and scripting, I made the hard surface models such as the player spaceship and main menu in Maya 2015 and the more organic looking ships like the alien spacecraft and the planets were box modeled in Maya and then brought into Mudbox to add further detail. 

The main menu is the main hub of the game, after each level you are returned to the screen and are able to quit from there or play another level, Occasionally ships fly past to make the scene feel more dynamic and natural. To model it I took inspiration from real spacecraft and used similar screens and controls that are found within them. All the colour and texture work for the menu was done by another member of the group I was in.

To return to the menu in mid-game the player can just hit the escape key to bring up the in game menu and press quit, players can also restart the game or return to the game by pressing the relevant buttons. Quitting to the menu will save your score in the high-score function but restarting will reset as you didn't choose to stop playing.

Above shows some of the scrips I worked on when making the game these include inverted controls of the game to help test different control types in the editor as well as a function to destroy the ship if you stay near a planet for long enough. 

My favorite part of the game was modeling the ship in Maya, I tried to include as many small details as I could in order to make the ship look much more realistic. The final poly-count for the ship was over 100k however this was reduced for the game through the deletion of faces that weren't visible. 

If I was to do anything differently I would of added more fine details using bump/normal maps as well as do a better job of unwrapping for texturing. 

The main art piece I worked on was the diffuse map for the enemy ship, the initial concepts for the ship made it seem like an organic living thing rather than the player ship which was much more industrial and rigid.

The final GUI shown in the image above shows ship status and a score box. The original is shown above the heat warning image. We decided to use a different more clear GUI to remove the possibility of the GUI obstructing the player view.

Overall I feel that the game turned out positively, I would of liked to have done a little more to the game but I feel that with what we have got we have done well. If i was to change anything next time I would stick to an initial idea more and perfect that as the game play isn't that strong.