Brightside

2024

For my second skills project, I created a game inspired by DarkSide. This was the first 3D game I worked on at the academy and we used Play3D for the project. The main objective was to become familiar with 3D game development while adding "juice" to the gameplay, including particle effects, post-effects and other enhancements like screen shake, abilities and interesting lighting.

Key Features

• Gameplay: The gameplay is similar to DarkSide and Asteroids. You have asteroids that split into two until they are too small to split further. Players can pick up abilities that modify their shooting mechanics, such as increasing the number of bullets, adding shooting directions and affecting damage. There are also health pickups and when health is low, the screen pulses red, accompanied by a smoke effect. As the player survives longer, the planet grows larger, more asteroids spawn and the asteroids move faster. Additionally, bomb towers and abilities spawn more frequently, making the game increasingly chaotic as time goes on. A small score counter is displayed at the top, but UI was not a priority for this project.
• Juice: This was my first attempt at creating 3D particles. I developed several effects, including bullet trails, fire for ship thrusters, smoke for low-health engines and an explosion effect that combines a smoke ring with a flash from an animated sprite. To enhance the game's juice, I added dynamic lighting from the ship, the planet and a distant star. I also included sound effects and screen shake for explosions and collisions, with the intensity based on the distance to the player. Additional effects included glowing abilities when certain power-ups were active and a bomb tower that, when shot down, falls and triggers a massive explosion, affecting all nearby asteroids and causing the screen to flash white.

Challenges, solutions and lessons learnt

One of the biggest challenges was figuring out the curved physics of a small planet, which required a lot of debugging to get right. I also learned how particle effects can be created using simple sprites and movement. It was interesting to discover how different combinations of emitters can create a natural-looking effect, while others make it obvious that it's just a sprite moving around. For instance, I hadn't considered that an explosion effect could use multiple emitters, such as one for smoke and another for the explosion flash. Additionally, I learned a lot from working with artists to create the assets for this game. It was important to be clear about exactly what my game needed, while also balancing the workload for the artists, who were working on assets for other projects. For example, the bomb tower was originally made for someone else, but I was able to reuse it with slight modifications, saving time compared to creating a new asset from scratch.