Inspiration
For this year's Rosehack, our team decided to begin our journeys in the world of 3D game development! As we each have a good amount of knowledge in 2D game development, we wanted to challenge ourselves, and use the 24 hours provided to create and experiment with the 3-dimensional side of Unity.
What does it do?
Stacking Overflow is a 2-player local multiplayer game, where two characters compete to bring crates from the center to their respective loading areas. The side to bring the most crates to the drop-off zone wins!
How We Built it:
We began with a 3D Unity project, adding packages and dividing up individual tasks based on our skillsets and what we found most interesting from this challenge. We used a lot of crucial technology while creating our project, including Blender for models, GitHub for version control, and VSCode as our IDE. Since we lacked a sound designer, we utilized free online resources as the source of our music and sound effects.
Challenges and Obstacles
Some of our biggest challenges came from working with 3D physics and creating/maintaining the relationships between each of our individual scripts. Unity's viewport also provided a few obstacles to development at times by not rendering certain layers or dividing the screen correctly. It was also quite challenging to create a game of this scope within the time limit, as most game jams we had done prior to this had been 72+ hours in length.
From this project, the accomplishments we were most proud of were:
- Creating our own 3D models
- Implementing a split screen and special visual effects with Cinemachine
- Properly applying texturing to Blender models so that they would fit our ideas and designs
- Fine-tuning Unity's 3D physics to fit our game vision. More specifically, we designed a dynamic quadratic function to rotate the player's plank so that the amount it tilted remained fair for how many crates the player was holding.
During the hackathon, we learned:
We learned the nuance of creating a compelling 3D Unity game, especially with regard to our packages such as 3D Physics and their configuration. We learned more about Cinemachine's potential, and how it can enhance the user's experience and immersion during the game. Finally, we learned about the vast uses for a 3D project in Unity, and we are now aware of how we can bring these transferrable skills to other hackathons or teams.
What's next for Stacking Overflow?
We plan on taking the skills we gained from our experience of creating this project, and applying them to meaningful future projects!
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