Summary
Lycan is an online multiplayer game for the PC built in Unity. The primary game mode involves two separate teams involved in a sort of tug-of-war gameplay. By defeating a member of the opposing team, they join your team, and vice versa. The winning team is the one that converts all members of the other team.
I worked in a team of six total students on this game. It was a project that had been started by another group of students, and had been changing hands for several months before we received it. The task we were given was to take the game in its state at that point and turn it into something complete and able to be put onto Steam Greenlight. What this meant was not only the addition of new features, but a complete and total overhaul to the game’s backend. Our team put in weeks of hard work and sleeplessness nights and we were able to drastically turn the game around and improve both the code base and the gameplay. Unfortunately, due to circumstances out of our control, we were pulled off of the project early to work on something else. While we were unable to see the game through to its final goal, there were countless improvements and lessons learned that made the experience well worth it.
My Contributions – Overhauling all UI/UX
For the whole of our time working on Lycan, I was tasked with reworking all UI/UX elements of the game. As the project had been worked on and passed from group to group for several months, it ended up right in the middle of Unity’s transition from the old OnGUI UI system to it’s new UI. This lead to the code having mixed uses of both Unity UI systems, much of it hard coded into other scripts that were being redone by other members of the team. Because of this, I had to take what art assets were salvageable and worth keeping, and redo everything from the ground up.
This was my first in depth experience in using Unity’s new UI, as well as in working with custom editor scripts. Working independently on all UI and UX for the game meant that I had to focus on both the backend code structure of the systems I built, as well as the frontend UI objects and prefabs. In addition to this, the game management and functionality scripts the UI would have to interface with were being worked on simultaneously, so I had to keep everything as clean, useable, and intuitive as possible for my other team members.