Unity Project and Proposal
Proposal due via e-mail by November 10; complete project due December 19.
The Unity project and proposal account for 35% of your course grade (10% for proposal, 25% for project).
Project
Working in pairs, trios, or quartets, produce a proof-of-concept project using Unity. This may be a significant modification of the 3D Platformer Tutorial, an expansion of the Tutorial, a new level based on the Tutorial, or (perhaps most difficult) an original Unity project. Overall, the project should reflect about about five weeks' work, three of those weeks fairly intensive. Below are some guidelines for various approaches.
- Modification
- Improve the existing game in several highly significant ways, by altering behavior of game elements, geometry of the play space, and/or general effects such as timing.
- Object Expansion
- Learn how to import new 3D objects into Unity from 3ds Max or some other modeling program. Add at least five new objects to the game. (These may be five instances of the same object, or one instance each of five objects.) Objects may be simple tokens of the sort called static meshes in some game systems. If you are feeling ambitious, experiment with an animated or animating character. (Warning: this could be extremely difficult.) If you want to try something hard but not terribly so, consider making your new meshes meaningful and/or manipulable in the game, such as the Health Pickups and Fuel Cell Canisters.
- Play Space Expansion
- Reconfigure the platform map in some significant way. Consider respositioning and/or animating existing platforms so that Lerpz must solve a spatial puzzle to advance in the game. Consider adding new platforms, either by using the supplied prefabs, or making your own meshes.
- Original Unity Project
- Create an explorable landscape with a reasonably complete array of geological features and objects (see for instance the "Lost Island" project that ships as a demo file for Unity). You may use assets from the Platformer Tutorial or other Unity projects. If you work from the Island demo, however, be sure to depart significantly from that model.
Proposal
By November 10, one member of your team must send me via e-mail a 1-3 page proposal. This document must include the following information, along with anything else you want to supply:
- Members of the team; job assignments optional.
- Main contact: this is the person whose directory will contain the final version of your project, along with your submission notes (see below).
- Main purpose of your project, EXPRESSED AS A QUESTION. What are you trying to discover or prove? In what way are you trying to improve on the existing game?
- Brief description of the project in two or three paragraphs.
Submission Instructions
Every team must submit a document with their project explaining the major features of the work. You may also want to discuss your development process, and indicate things that were difficult or impossible, as well as things you still need to discover. This document will be essential in assigning your grade. No project may receive a grade of A without submission notes. Name this document submissionNotes, save it in Word, PDF, or plain-text format, and include it with your project files.
Save your final project as a Web Player. The main contact for your team should create in her/his student-iat directory a new folder called COSC320. Put the Web player and all necessary accompanying documents into this folder, along with your submission notes.
Be sure to TEST YOUR WORK before submitting, using Mozilla Firefox as a browser.
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