Refuge is a 3D puzzle adventure game. An island to explore, with journal excerpts to discover the lore, and a mysterious door that unlocks with three hidden keys. Our team of three people, Cole, Kora, and I, filled the island with realistic beaches, forests, a maze, a tower, a cabin, and various foliage.
This game also has a two minute trailer on YouTube.
- This project was assembled in Unity 2021.3.11f1 across Windows 10, MacOS, and Pop!_OS 20.04.
- GUI and all 2D assets created in GIMP. Infinitly repeating textures for sand and grass for example:
- 3D models created in Blender. This rat model for example:
- Rigging, weighting, and inverse kinematic animation using keyframes done in Blender.
- Movement animations and state logic made using C# scripts in Unity.
- Material effects like transparency, reflections, and bump maps, created in Unity's Shader Engine.
- Formed a team of three for the entire semester. This specific game had eight weeks of development.
- Wrote a detailed Game Design Document that planned out the deliverables and unified vision.
- Met in weekly stand up meetings outside of our class time. Also communicated regularly in a Discord server.
- Adjusted our plan and development sprints around professor feedback and other school projects.
- Spent time together in person to solve software interaction problems and merge complex branches.
- Picked up and learned completetly new software tools independent of any instruction.
- Polished complete game, and created trailer at end to present to class!
Want to really take a look yourself?
The refuge_build_for_windows.zip is a complete and self contained Windows version. You can download it and play it for yourself.
Unity is a detailed IDE with many included libaries and tools. For visual assets created outside of it and imported, a surprising amount of information on their usage is stored inside their .meta files. For behavior defining code, C# scripts are called by a framework of multithreaded "game engines" and "managers". Although this project sticks to a simple set, each can be heavily modified for each game's individual needs. You can examine code in Assets/Scripts.
To examine the complete scene's organization and the tunable values, installing Unity on a Windows or Mac system is required. Installing and configuring a Linux environment that is able to correctly run Unity's shader engine and development is very challenging. I learned the hard way that Unity's "officially supported" distro and kernel are a bumpy road of installing missing dependencies, manually compiling unofficial libaries, and avoiding specific unstable tools. I got it all to work once for learning purposes, and I learned I'm never trying that again.
For a detailed analysis of the project install UnityHub, give them an email for a free personal license, download a 2021.3 version of the Unity editor and this repo, and import and open the project. I am aware this sentence is easier said than done. If you are comitted to trying this and hit an inevitable roadblock, reach out to me via email for IT support.