With this last update adding sound to the game, I declare this project finished and want to talk about it's design and all the assets I've used.

How did it start?

This project was meant as a challenge for me to go back to coding and as an entry for the Unity Programming Challenge at Games Job Fair Spring 2024. I'd written the general idea of this game like a year ago but the challenge pushed me to finally try to make it. My note read:

Simple lowpoly game. Run to tower that's shooting lasers at you. Should be good vfx practice cuz I have to communicate when you have to dodge. Goal is goodfeelbadassness so maybe when you get a near miss you can do smth cool like slowmo movement or parry. The player is maybe like a ninja samurai kind of character, agile but able to parry.

So there's quite some stuff I didn't do like the low-poly look and payoff when near dodging. The original idea was also to put emphasis on vfx practice, but instead it turned into code practice. This made the project more reliant on whatever I managed to get working. I did have ideas for power-ups, changing lanes and walking on walls, but I couldn't get that ready in time for the challenge. I'm happy with the features it has though. It's already at a good enough challenge level.

Progress

As a game artist I went about designing the game quite visually. Already I had ideas of how the player would die (smokebomb) and how the game's menu would have a camera panning into the gameplay. I started with a minimal design doc to jot everything down to organise my ideas and created a moodboard. Then started on features that a minimal endless runner would have. The first week was spent on setting Unity up, trying to get the player to move sideways and a road to spawn, move and despawn.

In week 2, I looked for assets that fit the theme on the Unity Store and Sketchfab (full list down below), and imported them into the scene. I spent quite some time experimenting with models, lighting and materials to try match my moodboard.

Week 3 was all about making the game an actual game with a closed loop of dying and reviving, and unique obstacles. I think one of the trickiest things I've pulled off is the watchtower. I struggled a lot with the line renderer and bullet spawning. I wouldn't have been able to do it without many talks with ChatGpt.

If I had more time I probably would've tried and made all the 3D assets myself.  The time limit really helped on making me focus on the coding and implementing part. If anyone's struggling with setting up deadlines on your own, try joining contests :)

Tips & Tricks

• I first made road prefab's in which I positioned the obstacles and made a custom environment around it. Later on I realised I needed way more obstacles prefabs than environment ones, so I opted to spawn 2 prefabs at once instead. One containing just the obstacles and ground. The other only the environment.
• All the road prefabs are prefab variants of one main prefab which only contained the ground, triggers and scripts. This allowed for consistency of the prefabs outside of obstacles and environment. For example, if I changed the road speed for the main prefab, it would change all of them.

• Unity's fog in the lighting settings turns distant objects a certain color but won't affect the sky. I used big planes with an alpha gradient in the distance to fade between the fog color and sky material.

• To accomplish the camera leaning effect I used Cinemachine and had it's look-at set on the player and an invisible sphere in front of the player above the middle lane. (It's colored magenta in the screenshot)

Assets & Credits

3D Assets

Unity Store
General City Builder by Chechu_8889
LowPoly Environment by Polytope Studio

Sketchfab
Japanese Wall by AO-INTERACTIVE
Japanese Paper Lantern by WIsEman_Tavern
Japanese Standing Lantern by Obeonix
Viking Watchtower by Sereib

All character animations and ninja character are from Mixamo

SFX

Hit - システム決定音_10 made by Make a field Music
Changing Lanes - 素振り made by 稿屋 隆
Gun - ビーム音 made by zmino
Sword Slash - CRAZY FISTS made by 稿屋 隆
Spikes - 金属が擦れる音「刃物」 made by えすにっく・かわひろ
Smoke - "Gun Powder Ignite" from YouTube Sound Library

Music

1st song - ロック忍法 written by shimtone
2nd song - 朧忍 written by shimtone

Title Font

Protest Revolution designed by Octavio Pardo (Google Fonts)