Joseph Horak - Design Case Study
Client: Personal Project: Alien Forest (videogame)
Timeline: One Week (Mar 23 - Mar 30)
Research and Writing Design Document: One day (Mar 23)
Level Design and 3D Modeling: Five days (Mar 24 - 29)
Programming and Polishing: One day (Mar 30)
Releasing and advertising on social media: 3 hours (Mar 30)
Purpose:
Create a short game that showcases my new skills in 3D modeling, texturing, and game design.
Outcome:
The game (Alien Forest) turned out to be a successful tone piece that has become my most downloaded solo release. This project was also selected as one of the featured projects for PlayCrafting’s Austin Showcase.
Process:
The process for this game started when I was assigned to create a 3D environment for one of my courses. Excited by this idea, I decided I wanted to create a polished and playable videogame so that I could complete the assignment and have a new release for my portfolio. Within the first day of development, I decided on the tone and theme of my game, a small forest that had been visited by aliens, and wrote the design document for the project. Once I had all this planned out, I created a Trello board to organize my tasks and decided how many tasks needed to be completed each day to finish the project on time.
Once I had all my tasks laid out, I began modeling and texturing everything that would be in the game, which took me about 5 days. Once I had everything modeled and textured, I dropped them into Unity and began designing the level. Once the level was put together, I added some post-processing effects to make everything pop more.
Now that the visual design of my game was finished, I implemented the standard First-Person controller and programmed the UI and Menus. The programming, in total, took about a day. After finishing this, I built the game out into downloadable executables and sent them out to a couple of friends to playtest. My friends then gave me feedback which I quickly addressed, and then I released my game, advertising it on my Twitter and Instagram pages.
Overall, I believe this project was a success because it achieved the atmosphere I had set out to create, got over almost 1,000 downloads, and received many positive reviews and comments from the people who played it.