BAFTA/Jude Birch Space Core (Unity) - Jude Birch (18) Lewes
“Asteroids, but an open-world adventure game - with dungeons to explore, boss fights and a huge story!”
Space Core starts in a futuristic utopian world. In this world, consciousness is a form of energy, like matter. Humanity has just made a breakthrough in conscious technology allowing people to harness the power of their mind to manipulate matter.
Alien life has recently been discovered. Aliens are amazing, however, they're also very dangerous, so the human race collectively invests in a new Space defence system in case of alien attacks.
You play as the first ever recruit on this huge space station (named the Internation Space Defence Station - ISDS). It's your first day on the ship when the aliens betray humanity. Using mind control powers, the aliens force the captain of the ISDS to blow up the entire world! As the pilot of the second ever ship using "conscious technology", you survive the enormous blast; making you the only survivor and leaving you with a crumbled up world. The explosion happens in such a way that the world becomes a huge cluster of asteroids.
You're left in an 8000-year long coma, over this time aliens infect and populate this broken planet. After waking up, you find out that there is a mysterious time machine located at the core of the world, however, the core's so hot if you want to travel there, you need to upgrade your ship. In the game you'd explore this destroyed world, made up of asteroids, structures, bosses, trying to find a way back in time. You need three upgrade module from each corner of this world, you obtain by defeating large bosses.
One of the main skills that I developed was learning how to create my own text box system, with custom images/ faces. I did this mostly by trial and error however I also looked online on forums for help on a few things (one of them being how to load custom textures from the game's resources via an ID!)
Probably the hardest thing to add to the game was the infinite terrain generation/ loading. The main problem was trying to make it run faster, I started off using an individual object for each block, but that was way too slow - so I switched to Unity's tile engine, which was good enough for premade scenes.
However, for the randomly generated overworld it wasn't fast enough, I overcame this by researching how the popular game Minecraft (also has infinite terrain) did it, I found out it split the world up into sections called "chunks" and then it split those chunks up into regions. So I split up the world in the same way in my game and the performance is now a lot better!
One of the first things I would do is add more detail to the ISDS level and add a cutscene after the player gets obliterated.
