Project Overview
This game was a student project made for one of the early 3D classes at DigiPen. My main goal with this game was to create a game that focuses on the fantasy of being a giant robot rampaging through a city. All scripts, gameplay elements and animations were created using Unity 3D and Visual Studio.
Designing the game
As this game was meant to focus mainly on the power fantasy aspect of being a giant robot, most of the visuals, sounds and animations were designed to reflect how powerful the robot is. A single punch is capable of reducing giant buildings to rubble, while slashes from the lase blade attached to one of the robot’s arm can slice a building to the point where it becomes a thin piece of concrete. While not exactly realistic in its approach, the idea of those mechanics was to make them very exaggerated to make the player feel the strength of their character.
The enemies are giant tanks that call for reinforcements whenever a set number of them are taken down, making the player feel like they are a menace big enough to the point where the military is using all their power to stop them.
The sounds of people screaming and rescue vehicles being called in are meant to make the player feel like they are causing a large amount of destruction and that there is something going on around them.
Creating the game’s animations
All of the animations of the player’s character were made using Unity’s animator tools. Basically, the Robot is divided into three parts: the head, the torso and the tank treads. The punch animation was created by straightening one of the arms of the robot while its torso rotated slightly, both animations combined created the punch motion. The slash animation was slightly easier as the arm with the blade simply needs to move outward while the whole torso rotates around its center.
Particle emitters are used for the fire effect on the backpack, the puffs of smoke when the player jumps and when the tanks fire, the muzzle fire for the tanks’ barrels, the blade arm for the robot, among several other effects. There were no new particles made for those effects, they all use Unity’s default particle.
Finally, the camera shake used for the buildings being destroyed and the explosion at the end of the game were made by creating a camera holder object and parenting the camera to it. A script containing a function that changes the camera’s position slightly every frame for a set amount of time was added to the camera object and an event that calls that function is sent every time a building is destroyed.