INTRODUCTION

Toy Wars was a 3-month long project developed using Unity and C# as a part of my studies at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE). The project was developed by 5 games development students and was the final assessment task of the first year of studies. My role, along with one other student, was programming.

My role in programming consisted of several main tasks including the turn manager, teddy bear bases, gameplay UI and menus, as well as other various scripts required throughout development. The other programmer mainly focused on soldiers, working on the shooting mechanics and movement.

PROJECT GOALS

The overall goal of the Toy Wars project, other than an assignment requirement, was to create a simple, turn-based, player versus player game inspired by other games like worms and army men.

The game was intended to be a two-player hot-seat with army soldiers and teddy bears acting as units for each player. The end goal was to kill all of the enemy units or destroy the enemy Teddy Bear before the other player did the same. The project had a few hiccups along the way but mostly turned out how we intended minus a few different weapons and unit types.

PERSONAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS

• First turn managment system.
• Unity UI usage.
• First unit spawning system.
• First three-dimensional development project.
• First time developing a game with a full team.
• Finding, solving and fixing complicated bugs.

LESSONS LEARNED

During the development of the Toy Wars project, I learnt many things about teamwork and scope. Toy Wars was one of the first group video game projects most of the students had ever worked on, and as a result, everyone was very excited. We were all overconfident, thinking we could do anything, quickly realizing and falling felt to the pressure of how much work we had given ourselves. As a result, we had to scope down a lot of great original ideas we had envisioned as staples of the projects. It was a hard reality.

As a programmer on the project, there were many things I learnt. Things I thought were simple programming tasks didn't turn out to be so simple. An example of this was the turn management system, in which I implemented quickly at the start of development, moving on to other tasks thinking it was more or less complete. Quickly issues started to arise and I had to rethink my strategies, the turn management system was not simple, it was kind of complicated.

Other things I learnt during my time working on this project was the importance of planning and research, especially when it came to things like a turn management system, for example. My take away from this is I shouldn't assume something might be simple without confirming it first, as well as a better understanding of how to scope a project.