Inspiration
Both of us have heavily enjoyed video games since we were young, and as Computer Science majors we often like to experiment in small video game development ourselves.
What it does
Aliens Took My Friend is a short top-down adventure game where your fellow astronaut friend has been kidnapped and taken onto an alien spaceship. It is your moral duty to save your friend from these hostile extraterrestrials by using your levitating laser gun to rid of them for good.
How we built it
We used Unity and its default version control system to distribute work amongst each other. We communicated through Discord and made sure to discuss any roadblocks we encountered. Blender was used to design each 3D Model.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges was trying to figure out how to correlate the current mouse position into a 3D space. Though we tried several different approaches, we felt that forcing an orthographic perspective on the camera would allow for the most accurate mapping of the mouse position into 3D space.
Another challenge was enemy behavior; we had to plan how to set up a system that would contain the various enemy types and how our game would distinguish between them.
But of course the greatest challenge of all was time. 36 hours to program even a short game is no easy task, especially when you run into bugs and other issues that may cost you your precious time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Completely top down orthographic projection can make it hard to understand depth and distinguish details between objects, so we decided to rotate every object about the X axis.
Changing the camera view back to perspective reveals the trick, and it does look a bit strange at first, but it looks great in orthographic projection.
Though both of us shared a dense programming workload we are very proud of what we were able to accomplish.
Apart from programming features like room-loading logic and player states, Ricardo Colom completely designed and modeled all of the assets seen in the game, including the Astronauts, weapons, aliens, and level layout. He also entirely produced the game's central song.
Julian Lopez was responsible for designing and programming enemy behavior, which included unique instructions for each of the 5 enemy types, including the final boss. The inclusion of different final boss "phases" was one of his favorite and most proud additions.
What we learned
Working in teams always reminds you that communication is one of the most important things to focus on when working on a game development or any software development project.
What's next for Aliens Took My Friend
We want to improve the presentation of the game, such as updating the alien models and giving them particles and animations. Currently the game length is currently very short, so it would be great to increase that as well.
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