BoxByte (Itch.io)

Unity + C# - released

An action arcade game without any attacking. The project was a sort of challenge for myself to make a fun game that didn't have the defining mechanic of action games. How would that look? How could you call it action without attacking? That was the base conception of BoxByte and it grew from there.

As with most projects, it ended up being much larger than envisioned.

The Concept

Early on I decided I should set the foundation on a core mechanic and taking inspiration from a favorite game called Ikaruga, I decided to make the game color based. There would be three colors RED, BLUE, and GREEN. With matching colors being friendly and opposing colors hurting you. It was also decided to make the game take place within the connections of a network that you were trying to escape from.

The main game consisted of a digital tunnel that turned and twisted that the player moves through. It's made out of a simple cylinder with its origin centered on the play stage that was rotated to fake the effect of a turning tunnel.

Each gate was modeled in blender with albedo and emission maps to achieve the look in the game. Inkscape was used to design the energy lines covering each stage.

Simulations

I had been experimenting with destruction simulations within blender and these are used to create both the effect of dying and the shattering glass that plays between stages in the game. Blender was used to simulation the physics of the objects breaking and these were then baked into animations used in the game.

Since the mechanics of the game were simple. Must of the work was involved in content creation and playtesting and balancing.

UI and Menus

This was my first entry into making a UI and it was a very enlightening experience. Ultimately, I decided on something more traditional to take advantage of the preexisting knowledge players have.

I made it unique by adding a sprite animation to any highlighted button. I made this animation in blender by having a 3D plane disappear into darkness and rendered it into image sequences.

Originally the HUD was very unique with 3D depth to it. But I ultimately feared this would hurt the function of it and went with something very simple and minimal and just focus on the functionality.

In the end I now believe I should have done something more in the middle instead. Making something functional while also being unique too.

Wins and Struggles

This was my first game using another game engine and it was a mind opening experience. Overall, I spent 6 years working in Unity and its concepts such as components became engrained in me.
3D modeling and animation worked very well in Unity and the simple retro art worked as a great introduction to the skill. Work was done hand in hand with blender and the amount of knowledge gained from that time has paid dividends since.
This was my first time designing a UI and HUD and the game's UIs went through many revisions including a 3D HUD that had depth, I left the experience with a serious respect for the field of UI/UX. This ended up taking a huge slice of the time spent in development and broke many of my preconceived ideas I had when entering.
A huge respect for Version Control: About half-way through development, I suffered a major bug with the Unity editor and lost every single line of code in the project. I was completely heartbroken and it took 3 months for me to open the project again. When I did, I took the chance to make everything higher quality and was determined to use learn and use GIT from then onward.

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