CSC 470 - Game Programming

Final Project: A Complete Game with a Theme

Name your Unity project final

The final project is for you to create a complete (small) game. Where the previous small games were intended to give you experience and practice with the technical topics in the course, the final project should be a complete, tuned, fun and relatively good-looking game that you could give to a stranger and it would be reasonable to expect that they would enjoy their experience (that’s harder than it sounds!).

Also, have your game have some sort of theme, or some sort of story (even if it is a small/abstract one). Many of you are already doing this, but try to do something “on purpose” rather than just defaulting to whatever you can make work or whatever game trope comes to mind.

• A start screen/menu (this can be as simple as your title and a “click to begin” button
• Something that ends the gameplay and brings the player back to the main menu. Usually there would be a way to win, and a way to lose
• During gameplay, there should be no way to “get stuck”
• During gameplay, your world should be bounded (no falling off of cliffs forever, or flying off into infinity)
• Audio?

Finally, try your best to get rid of anything that isn’t directly adding positively to the gameplay experience. This means that there shouldn’t be unnecessary long corridors, or hard to find collectables, etc. I.e. spend some time on design.

Final Project Due Dates

Design Document (20%)

Due 11-26-24

Your design document should include:

A detailed plan for the game. This will involve describing all of the following components:

• Gameplay description (what is your “core mechanic”)
• Input
• Visual style
• Audio style
• Interface sketches
• Story/theme description

Three feature set targets:

• the “low-bar “of you will create (this should still be a “complete game”)
• a target that you expect to get done
• a desired high-bar if things go exceptionally well. Plan these out carefully, so that you can definitely achieve the first goal, and likely hit the second

A timeline of what you need to accomplish and by when to complete your game on time. Look at the personal schedules, your classes and other projects, and plan accordingly.

Be sure to spend time on this. The document should be approximately “2-3 pages”, and you should include it in a README.md file in your your project directory named ‘final’.

You should see your design document when you go to:

https://github.com/(your github username)/csc470-fall2024/tree/main/assignments/final

Core Mechanic Playtesting (20%)

Due 12-6-23

At this point, the core mechanic of your game should be mostly complete.

Before class, create a WebGL build of your game that demonstrates what you have working and post it to github. In class, we will discuss areas that you should spend time improving, including bugs, and gameplay features.

Final Submission (60%)

Due 12-13-24

Submit a WebGL build of your game, as well as all of the project files to your GitHub repository.

Additionally, create one or more of the following and submit it along with your project files to your GitHub repository:

• A “one pager” where you put a description of your game and some representative screenshots (think of it like an ad for your game)
• A simple trailer that shows gameplay
• A simple website that describes your game with images

In the final meeting, held over zoom, on Fri, Dec 13, 2024 11:20AM-01:50PM (see canvas announcement), we will check out all of your games.

NO LATE WORK!

Submission

Submit your project to github. Make sure your Unity project is titled “final” and located in the “games” folder of your local github repository. To push it up to github, open Github Desktop, commit your changes (you need to enter a comment in the field on the bottom left of the screen), and click the “Push origin” button near the top middle of the screen.

If everything worked, you should be able to play your game by going to:

  http://(your git username).github.io/csc470-fall2024/games/final/

If exporting your game to WebGL doesn’t work, build your game for either Mac or and attempt to upload that to GitHub in your Assets folder. If your game is too large to upload, include a file to a link to download the game (you can just put it on Google Drive, Dropbox, or some other such platform).