Rocko's Modern Life

Inspiration

"Bullet-hell" style games have been popular since the era of arcade machines and the first consoles. We were inspired to develop a game similar to this through a game called evades.io, which has been a good way to pass by quarantine, but wanted something that was 3D and had more personality. We decided that building a game around a space theme would best accomplish this.

What it does

Rocko's Modern Life is a story of a small asteroid who always dreamed of crashing into Earth. This game is Rocko's journey through 9 levels that test your ability to dodge around various obstacles in order for him to achieve his dream. The main objective of each level is to reach a black hole that teleports Rocko to the next level without getting hit by the other rocks floating around him.

How we built it

We brought the pieces of Rocko's Modern Life together using Unity. The main player character, as well as the rocks that are seen floating around each level, were handcrafted in Blender.

Challenges we ran into

Being a team of two with one member being completely new to Unity and game development/software in general, it was difficult to get the project started. It involved watching a lot of videos on Unity, and figuring out how to use the tools that we were given through the program. On top of that, we were both noobies when it came to blender so it took a lot of work to get our models looking good as well as exporting it to unity properly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One thing we were particularly proud of was the spherical cage type effect we were able to create for the levels. It wasn't something that had an easy out of the box solution so we had to really dive in and do some research on how to get this effect without creating an obscene amount of walls. The script we made to control the camera following Rocko, along with the spinning animations he does is also something that we are proud of. Despite our challenges, we believe that we did a good job at taking advantage of the tools we had to develop a game that matched our vision. Especially with the fact that we had such a short amount of time and so much of it was spent on learning the programs.

What we learned

The main thing we learned from this project was the basics of Unity. We learned how to: create assets (with some being created through blender), implement a health system, work with shaders, animations, audio systems, scene manager to connect our levels, as well as the collab feature to simultaneously work on the project.