Group Members: Somara Atkinson, Todd Bello, Marcus Meyers, Karl von Steuben, Stephen Teodori

Snak3d is the project my group has been working on for the past 3 weeks. One of the goals behind this project was to develop a better understanding of how important scoping is in designing a game, as well as how important a design document is to the development process. The ideal design doc could used to develop a game without the project lead, and should still turn out the way he or she envisioned it. First, we conceptualized games to create in Unity, and developed design documents for a fully playable first level. Next, we switched docs and developed a different group’s game in order to test the quality of the design doc and  how well scoped the project was.

The majority of the class had not used Unity before this project, so it was definitely a learning experience for everyone involved. Our group decided to jump right into Unity and search for information as we needed it rather than spend time learning how Unity works through tutorials, which worked out well for us in the long run. With the exception of one or two powerups, we were able to implement everything in the design doc we were given. We also lucked out in that we were given one of the, if not the, best scoped projects to work on. This helped the most, considered that we were still working on it until two days before it was due.

Snak3D takes the mechanics of the classic Snake game and restructures them for a 3D dimensional environment. The player travels around the world collecting fruit for points and avoiding enemies, obstacles, and its body. They can pick up powerups along the way, such as an axe to cut down the size of the snake’s body. The most difficulty was encountered in having the snake travel to the various sides of the cube correctly. Rather than use a grid system for movement, we gave the snake the ability to move freely around the object since a general engine could be developed for any shape rather than having to individually encode the grid of each face of each level. This proved much more difficult, but was satisfying to see it working in the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKjMS91wnyU