Zomb-Merge - Final Release

Zomb-Merge - Final Release

My name is Kyle Ramser, and I am currently studying Computer Animation and Game Development at CSU - Chico. I am currently in a mobile development class, and our group just put out the full release of our game “Zomb-Merge.” We went through some rough spots during the development, but I think I can speak for my whole team and say we are proud of how the game turned out in the end. I learned a lot through the process, such as programming and texturing, and as the lead designer on the project, it was fun to see my vision come to fruition and to see how it changed along the way. Not only that, but this was the first time I had released a full game onto any platform, so it was exciting being able to make my first fully fledged game for release.

As for what went wrong in the process, we had a lot of trouble with attacking and switching out the cities. When creating the attack script, we had a miscommunication that ended in the loss of a huge amount of work. To avoid this in the future, we definitely need to communicate who is in which branch and what they are working on. We communicated better for the rest of the project, but losing a ton of progress was definitely not good for the state of the game. As for switching out the cities and backgrounds, it wasn’t necessarily a problem that needed solving, but a piece of the game that kept causing issues that needed to be worked out. The cities wouldn’t move, the damage values wouldn’t show, and other similar issues kept popping up and needed to be addressed for the game to work. This definitely taught me a lot about programming and even Unity itself, and in the end, I was able to finish everything and have it in working order. To fix this in the future, rather than having one person work on it, I think it would have been helpful to have the whole team look over the issues and figure them out, especially the programmer in this specific instance. So next time I have an issue like this, I’ll make sure I let my group members know and work it out with them. The other thing that didn’t help out was that I got sick a few times during the process. This burnt up a lot of valuable work time and made the game suffer a bit, so next time I’ll be sure to let my group know immediately so we can shift what everyone is working on to accommodate.

There was quite a bit during the process that went right when making Zomb-Merge. After the merge error lost us a chunk of progress, we were on top of our communication and were all way better about planning out who was working on what within the project. I got a lot of experience in C# during this project and learned a lot about Unity. I completed several scripts for the movement of the cities when attacking, all of the UI and menu elements, the board space, a lot of the models, and the main soundtrack for the game. This was the first time I had ever worked with sound effects and music in Unity, so it was a helpful thing to learn for later projects and ended up going really well. Since I was in a texturing class this semester as well, it was nice that I was able to take what I was learning there and apply it in Zomb-Merge, and I think all of the models and textures ended up turning out well. The hardest out of all of these by far was the city-switching animation, as it took a lot of code and time to figure it all out. The constant bug fixing and changing of my approach on this portion took a lot of work, and it ended up being the most rewarding in the end. Being able to complete such a daunting task gave me a lot of momentum, and I was really proud of the additions I was able to make to the game with it.

So overall, what I learned from this class and the creation of this project is that communication is vital when creating a game. A lot of the problems that we had arose from a lack of good communication, so in future projects, I will be making sure that everyone in the group knows what is going on and who is doing what. The creation of this game was a challenge, but one that taught me a lot about game development, mobile or not. I’m proud of what my group was able to produce, and I am proud of my own work and the time that I put into it, especially in the later sprints.