The Aquanaut (Final Game Project at Uni)
Course: Engine-Driven Product Design
During the autumn semester of 2022, I and a team of six other students joined forces to create a game of our choosing. We were set on making an underwater game from the start and worked with top down and movement in 2D as a restraint. In our interpretation of the 2D constraint, we made a game without jumping mechanics where the character can only move in the x and z dimensions of Unity's 3D space. The work on this title was a demanding exercise, divided into preproduction, production, and QA periods, rounded off with a final presentation, delivered at Malmö's DevHub, a local game studio collective.
My Roles and Motivations
Tool Coding -Â I programmed the bulk of the QA tool in collaboration with my pair programmer Lovisa Johansson. I chose the UI builder toolkit, to which I programmed a sign up and welcome screen for our test build. I felt right at home in the UI builder toolkit because of my earlier explorations of the C-Sharp WPF and UWP environments. I also chose that framework because it is possible to develop both for the game product itself and for the Unity environment. In Unity, I built a simple visualizer for the data, that among other things showed where on the map players most often died. I assembled a simple shader for that purpose that drew positions as a heat map to a render texture. The tool shows player death, heals, paths, and enemy attacks in different layers. The data is collected during testing as a JSON-file and e-mailed with the player's consent to a Gmail address that collected our results. This approach was in line with our one-week time frame allotted to tool development. The tool was successfully deployed and we could collect data and identify weaknesses in our game. My motivation to work with code was of course that I wholeheartedly enjoy coding, I enjoy the challenge and the growth that provides and I take any opportunity to deepen my skills in honing my skills in the C family, be it scripting, object-oriented programming, or shaders. I also lent my support to the development of the main menu backend.
Artist  - In the beginning of our project we decided to not use asset packs, so we took it upon ourselves to create all assets during our limited ten week project. I have been drawing all my life and I have attended Konstskolan Munka's first year and Göteborgs Konstskola's Painting Program's second year as I explored the possibilities of becoming a full time artist. For the purpose of this project, it meant that I felt confident that I could deliver the graphics for the menus, the concept art and 2D textures within time and perform my other duties within the project. The art I have made was reduced in complexity to allow for efficient production. In terms of motivation I'm just as passionate about art as about coding! I especially enjoy to challenge myself and push my skills to their limits, be it in respect to time, style or expressiveness. Art for me was the bridge in to game development, as I have always been fascinated by visual world building and storytelling.
Project management  - I took on the responsibilities of team lead. I managed the meeting bookings and handled any conflicts that came up between team members, I structured the work in sprints, with ticket assignments for different tasks, and managed team-building activities like for example a weekend road trip to Sweden Game Conference in Skövde. I shared the responsibilities with the second most senior developer, who took care of external communication, while I handled internal matters. We shared the responsibilities so that we could free up time mutually to pursue game development tasks. My motivation to engage in project management was that I knew that my seniority and work experience and first degree in media production would grease the machinery of the group and create a solid foundation to work on. I also believe that I as a senior member of the team have a duty to step up and make things run smoothly.
