To The Core - 3rd person platformer group project

Today I bring you our group project for my Gameplay Programming university module,

To The Core!

To The Core is a 3rd person platformer where you've got to go deep into the earth to solve the case of the mysterious earthquakes that have begun to plague the land!

This group project involved 5 members, myself included, where I provided and created a range of mechanics and gameplay systems. I'd like to go through a few of them here and follow it up with a short review of how the team aspect of this proejct went.

Straight off the bat, the player within the game was developed by myself, brought over fomr the original player character demo. a fellow group member, Zoe had sword mechanics in her player system, and I wanted to also add sword combat to my won, so I went about looking into how she did it. I only ended up using the basic concept, then went and created my own animation system that linked up to my own player. In the end, I managed to create a sword with a 3 hit combat by rotating through an enum of attacks, executing the correct animations if the player continued to chain attacks within the given window of opportunity. Furthermore, I upgraded my combat system to use a sphere cast all function instead of a simple ray cat for better hit area results.

As I was not only in charge of developing the player and how it felt withing my level, ensuring ground checks worked on the levels created by my fellow group members, but also in-charge of the player's combat system, it was only natural that I created the framework for enemies to be built upon. Zoe had mainly focused on the second scene and wanted to add spider enemies, and so after giving her the framework, she generalised the method of receiving incoming damage through a general 'Enemy' class. She went on to create the enemy AI and attack patterns themselves, but the stats fed straight but into the player stats script that I had setup. Later on, enemies were needed in level 3 and it seemed appropriate to also add my slime enemies, altering them to become 'magma slimes' given the lava setting. This was a simple copy paste job from my pre-made combat demo system, but I had to alter some things to work with the new lightweight renderer pipeline & the new generalised enemy framework, which wasn't too bad. Finally, I went on to balance the attack damage & health stats of all the enemies and the player to feel nice and balanced throughout the gameplay.

Our team originally had a group meeting as well as created an online document regarding the plan for each level. At that stage I had come up with the plan and structure for the first level myself, but hadn't the time to implement it with all my time spent on the cross-level player  character, player input and combat systems. Thank fully a fellow group member, Gabriel stepped up to ascertain the assets and build the scene according to my plans. Later, I swapped in and created the cave area, populated the scene with sheep enemies (they are immune and can just be bumped around, don't worry ethics were thought about), and rearranged the level's structure a bit to feel nicer to play. I ran into some issues with Gabriel using a Unity terrain when running the 'isGrounded' function within my player, so we ultimately had to swap that out for a flat plane.

Other than all that, I mainly acted as a somewhat manager for the group, ensuring everyone was on track, had tasks to do. Zoe did a fantastic job creating all the lovely functionality of the second level's minecart system, as well as everything else within that scene. Cameron used his third-year knowledge to get in the know about advanced camera systems using Cinemachine, and provided all the cutscene for each level and did most of the work on the thrid level, albeit Dan's attempt to create it. Gabriel did a great job providing an NPC system, as well as the raw power-ups for each level. He also create most of the UI.

The group's distribution worked quite well, but we encountered many issues when merging work together. Unity doesn't like it when multiple people are trying to work on the same scene, so we used GitHub and multiple branch to try and keep each scene separate, ensuring only 1 person was working on each scene at a time. Sadly, there were a few conflicts that came up when we merged the scene together and into the development branch at multiple stages, but this acted as a great learning experience for me. ​Personally I wish we had more time to add even more to the game, but isn't that always the case haha. Thanks for reading!

A full video of the game's playthrough can be found below!
The game features power-ups, coins, enemies, minecarts, moving platforms, cutscenes, combat, mazes, harmless sheep, and talkative farmers!