About
Emergency Contact was a group project I worked on throughout my second year of Game Design. It is a fast-paced RPG developed within Unity, allowing the player to go through various events and fight against zombies.
Project Info
Role: Gameplay Programmer
Team Size: 5
Time frame: 8 months
Engine: Unity 2022.3.41f1 (C#)
Combat System
Dissonance is a rhythm-based tower defense game so the rhythm system is the most important core system as it interacts with all other components of our tower defense game. This system has gone through many iterations gradually perfecting it over the capstone project.
Early Iterations of combat
The final iteration of combat
Our combat design had a bar that gradually filled up as the fight went on called the action bar. The first iteration of combat didn't have this as it just had the tokens the player used to attack with. Eventually, this led to the final iteration which allowed the player to charge up a token to use it or hold a good one for later use.
Skills and Knowledge Gained
Unity ScriptableObjects: Throughout the course of the project I used scriptable objects to hold data for the encounters such as combat and dialogue. As well as enemies where the designer could input the data into the fields and an enemy would work within a combat encounter
JIRA Management: We used JIRA to manage tasks and estimate how long those tasks would take to allow us to see the velocity we have on finishing tasks. This allowed me to take a more organized approach to the tasks I had taken on and made sure everything was finished
UI/UX Design: I had to setup the various UI/UX elements for all the core features and during our first round of playtesting we found that the UI got messed up when played on a widescreen monitor. This experience helped me with properly setting up UI that can scale to the size of the monitor
Challenges
Modular Game Components: A challenge I had to overcome was to learn how to make the various systems such as the combat, dialogue, and map system modular. Where our designers would be able to go into unity and create enemies for combat, dialogue for events and story as well as map nodes to allow the player to go around the map and experience these encounters. I had mostly solved this issue by using scriptable objects with readable fields that the designer will just need to input the info they need for the desired object and the system will read that info and work with it accordingly.