Carl Eats Sheep

Carl Eats Sheep was made for my Game Technology II class as the final project. In Game Tech II, I learned how to write in C# and make game in a 3D space in Unity for the first time. The final assignment was to make a full gameplay experience or vertical slice using only things that we had learned how to do in the class. Having worked with pilot controls in the class, my team and I decided that turning the classic video game, Snake, into a 3D experience would be an interesting challenge. Our professor, Guillaume Langlois, loved the idea and sent us on our way to make it. Our team composition was a problem initially, having no specialized artists or programmers to work with. In the end, we found that we worked very well as a squad, each having our own, different strengths that helped bring the project together.

I handled all camera work, menuing, skybox and music switching, all sound engineering, sheep physics and spawn systems, and UI.

This arcade-style game's objective is to eat as many sheep as you can, and avoid crashing into the play boundaries and the player's own body. In eating sheep, the dragon the player controls gets faster and longer, making it harder to control and giving the player more obstacles to avoid. This system makes moving around the atmospheric setting more difficult and exciting over time. When the player eventually crashes, every segment of the dragon's body explodes and is tallied up as the player's score.

The main challenge for me to figure out while developing this game was the camera system. Being able to move and rotate the camera in all directions to always have a good view of the dragon was difficult to pull off. It still is not perfect in its current state, but works well enough. If I were to change one thing about the camera in this build it would be where I have the camera focusing. In developing Planet Snatchers and Keep On Rolling, I learned that the camera can be positioned in a way that can give the player move room to look at where they are going rather than so much focus on the player character in the center of the screen.

Even though the game is pretty simple, I am proud of the amount of polish my team and I were able to put on it in only 4 weeks.