Walking Sim Project Reflection

Under Sand is the largest 3D project in Unity that I have done so far. It let me learn that there are so many things to consider to build up a great 3D scene in a game. Basic layout, models, textures, audios, particles, cameras, they all should be carefully considered and put into the scene if you want to make a scene look really great for players. Also, I build this game starting with thoughts, but having thoughts doesn’t mean that I can build them in the Unity. Moreover, building out a scene in Unity editor doesn’t mean that it will keep same look after exporting into WebGL. From this process, I learned that I should leave more time for the future project for adjusting and De-bug to make it even better. Playtest is also really important and I should do it more in the next project.

This project started with some simple phrases: ancient, desolate ruins with futuristic stories. At the beginning I really want to play around with the concept of ancient and futuristic. I thought it will be interesting to make these opposite phrases into same environment. In the first version, I made a desert environment with some ruins and pyramids on it, and then I thought about how to incorporate futuristic elements in it. My first idea is an ancient museum built by both real ruins and illusions and built for exhibiting human history after human extinction. Then when I put things into the scene, I found that it’s too broad and hard to achieve in this project with the resources and time I have. I keep the human extinction element in my story and change it into a scene of ancient ruins visited by an alien.

Playtest is also really important in my project. I tried to make the player into an alien who is much shorter than a normal person, so I tried to make everything in this world really big. In the paytest, the player tell me that the stair is in a really large scale. However, after I ask her more about it I learned that other things (like trees) in my scene are not large enough to tell the player its height. After that I change the scale of everything in the scene again to make it more obvious that player is a smaller creature in this world. 

Also there is another problem that I didn’t solve yet in this project. The webGL version of the game is different than its in the unity editor. It’s seems that the camera filter is not working in the webGL and the light system in my second scene also have some problems. I thought it’s a shader problems but I cannot solve it with my current knowledge and time. In the next project, I will leave more time for the exporting and debug process.