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Shadow Step - 2021
Metroidvania
Shadow Step is a metroidvania where the player must unearth the castle's corruption
The aim of the game is to go through and kill the bosses to find out what is causing the corruption spreading through the castle. On your journey you find notes relating to the tragedy that befell here and obtain new skills to survive the castle's tough former residents. You seem to also find some others who have not been consumed by the miasma plaguing the castle and gain assistance from them. But... what lays beyond the castle inner-most doors, what other tragedies await.
Self Analysis
Overview
Shadow Step is a 20 week project with 4 programmers, 2 designers and 2 artists. It is a 2D pixel art metroidvania with a Japanese samurai theme.
This was the biggest project I have ever tackled and has taught me a lot in programming. Learning how to keep things within scope and making sure we have time to make the game fun for the players .
A proper introduction to a project like the ones we will be making in a job environment. The number of valuable skills and lessons are many in this project and will prove to help me greatly in my future endeavours.
Team work analysis
This was the longest project I have ever been in and has taught me a lot in the difference between just making a workable game to trying to make a game with polish.
This also means I learnt a lot about teamwork and how much each discipline actually relies on the other. We had a bit of a lack of art for a while due to the amount of art the artists had to make and therefore we saw how empty the game seemed without some of the art despite all the fun and functional game mechanics.
I grew to appreciate how much each person put into the project with myself wanting to help my group members in any way I could. To be honest I feel a bit bad that the project is now over since I had a blast seeing this game go from some grey boxes to what it is now.
It also helped me learn what other people in the group are good or bad at and we would soon help each other out on subjects we aren't familiar with. What I learnt was that there is a major difference to working on a project with the same people for a long period compared to a small one.
Code analysis
I learnt a lot of Unity's inner workings in this project, I learnt a lot of useful ways of using scriptable objects as well as some ways to generate UI into the scene.
I was mainly in charge of UI as well as the skill tree system, achievement system, note system and some of the menu systems. This meant I oversaw making the front and back end of things like the skills and achievements, with how the info is changed and the UI displayed to the screen.
Since we would sometimes add in some new stuff I made my systems as modular as I could and could quite easily reuse it if I want to now. I feel this was more useful for increasing my overall experience in coding than working on making anything particularly difficult, which is still something very much required in learning to code.
Screenshots
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