Covid Sim

The Project

We started learning how to use Unity and Blender to create a 3D, first person game. Originally, we wanted to make a 2D, 8-bit game that played as a simulation of life during the Covid-19 pandemic. Eventually, as we became more confident using Unity and Blender, this idea evolved into a game set in the future where virus infected robots try to hunt you down. Due to issues with our project saves on different devices/networks, we are unfortunately unable to share all of the work that we've done so far. 1) Why did we choose to make this project? We made this specifically to enter into the Coolest Projects competition and to just have some fun learning some new skills. We were both also interested in making games together. 2) What did we find difficult while making this project and how did we work it out? By far, the biggest challenge involved numerous issues with accessibility on our devices. What worked fine one week was unusable the next. Many of our saves also mysteriously disappeared. This was extremely frustrating and slowed our progress significantly but it was out of our control. We had limited coding experience prior to starting this project, so we used Unity Learn and YouTube tutorials to help teach us new skills that we could then apply to our own project. We used Minecraft Education to design a draft version of our game world. Another challenge was having team members and teachers away for many lessons due to other responsibilities. We worked through this by doing some extra work outside of school. 3) Is there anything that we would do differently or add if we had more time? If we had more time, we would have updated the sprites that you see in the video to the ones that we had made earlier and unfortunately lost. We would also finish creating the game world environment in Unity and added many more levels. We would learn how to edit the scripts for these sprites to add different abilities and characteristics for the player and also NPCs. We would also add different types of objects that can be interacted with and added to the player's inventory. Finally, we would complete our gameplay loop by adding in a health and scoring system with clearly identified objectives. The last thing that we would do is add some narrative features to our game so that it tells a story.

View this project on YouTube