Hello all, I’m Mary (@MaryKCassin), and I’m the new intern here at Cipher Prime. I’m currently a rising junior at Ringling College of Art and Design studying Game Art and I’ve been interning here since the beginning of May.

My first full-blown assignment as a Cipher Prime intern came on my second week here:

Create a game in a week using Unity.

I was a little daunted, because I had never touched Unity before or made a functioning game. I knew I had to keep it simple, but I still wanted the game to be entertaining.

Then Christiana, a fellow intern, thought I should make a drunk simulation game. The goal would be to try and keep your drunk character from tipping over by using the arrow keys to keep him upright. I thought this was a great idea and that it could be even more fun if I made BJ, our boss, the main character.

“Get BJ Home” was born!

Learning Unity

My first challenge was just getting to know the nuts and bolts of Unity. To get myself started, I did a “make a game in 15min” tutorial on YouTube. This tutorial coupled with my previous knowledge of UDK and UE4 gave me the confidence to jump into a strange new development tool.

Drunken Movement

How do you simulate a drunken walk?

First, I had to figure out how to apply physics to the character as well a way to control the character while having him drunkenly stumble down the street. Funnily enough, this was the easiest problem to solve. I realized if I just made a triangle mesh with the point facing down and turned on gravity, you’ve got a “drunk” mesh.  I added a script that made the player rotate on the x-axis using the arrow keys and that was that.

Then I had to figure out how I was going to move the character down the street. At first I though I would just move the scene so that it appeared that the player was moving. But after realizing that would be too much work I scrapped that idea. Then, with Zenas’ (founder of QuadraTron Games and a member of the Philly Game Forge) help, I scripted a vector lerping between two places that moves the object a reasonable speed.

Game States

Next, my game needed death and win states. This was a little more difficult. I learned about flagging and tagging objects. Zenas had to help me and do a lot of explaining, but I eventually understood the whole process and constructed a fully formed game loop!

Asset Creation

Creating the assets was fun but stressful, because I had to make a south Philly city street scene in a week. I managed to make enough assets, and when I put the lighting low enough then you couldn’t see the corners I had to cut to get everything done in time.

The Show and Lessons Learned!

When it all came together it was pretty cool seeing that I had made a game and I think everyone at Dev Night got a kick out of it.  When people stepped up to the plate I realized that it was probably too challenging. I was the only person who could finish the level.

Next time, I know I need to get someone to play test my game before I show it off to the world. I enjoyed making the game in Unity much more than I’d anticipated, and I found out which areas of game development I need to improve on (mostly scripting). Can’t wait for the next one!

You can play my game right below here! See if you can get BJ home.

–>