Hello,

As my first foray into game development,  I'm rather proud of what I've created here with Coren's Run. It's a special form of satisfaction to take a project like this from start to finish and I've learned a great deal about the game development process along the way. Coren's Run was originally called Core Run and was made under the guidance of Unity Learn's "Design and Publish Your Orginal Game: Unity USC Games Unlocked" course.  Following the guidance of the course, I made every effort to develop the game following industry standards and I enjoyed the process tremendously. The final part of the course would have me do a Post Mortem on the process and I felt it appropriate to share that here. If even one person gains value from reading my experiences, it would be very gratifying if you would let me know!

What Went Wrong

Coren's Run was original supposed to be an Endless digging game, where the player would run around the planet until eventually they went deeper underground. That's why it was original called "Core Run", as the goal would be to endlessly get closer to the planet's core but never actually reach it. I realized partially through Pre-production that this wasn't actually as feasible as I originally thought, because it would have demanded too many modifications to the environment. Different Layers of the planet would have to have different textures, lighting, and enemies in order to fit the theme. This would have required me to use a lot more third party assets than I was comfortable with and would have increased the time to design the game level drastically. Ultimately I decided that the games theme needed an overhaul for the purposes of efficiency, so I changed the direction of the games style entirely. Thankfully, I did it early on in the process, but I am somewhat disappointed that I didn't get to stick with my original theme.

Despite the changing of theme, I did manage to include every feature I wanted in the base game... except for one. Originally, I intended to have a series of "Hats" as unlockables. By reaching certain scores, the player would unlock new Hats for Coren to wear that would appear in-game. As a very casual game meant to only be played for 5-10 minutes at a time, I felt that it would have been satisfying for the player to have a visual representation of their performance that went beyond just a simple High Score Display. By having a goal to work towards, I hoped players would be incentivized to play the game several times. Unfortunately, implementing this feature was far more difficult that I imagined. I learned the basics of how to model and animate in Unity while I was in the middle of this project, so I discovered a bit too late that modifying an existing model during gameplay can be quite challenging. In the future, I would have my models and animations prepared beforehand whenever possible, or create code architecture that was more supportive of them swapping in the midst of gameplay.

What Went Right

I am certainly not an artist, and I have never tried to or claimed to be one. My degree is in Computer Science so coding wasn't an issue for me, but making a 3d model? Impossible! On top of this, I don't know any artists personally who have any interests designing games, so getting someone to work with wasn't really an option. This made the process of designing a video game art a bit.. difficult. However, I confronted the challenge head on and tried to come up with a theme that I could develop that didn't require special artistic talents. I took basic 3d shapes, like cubes, cylinders, and spheres, and just started messing around with them in Probuilder (Modeling software within Unity). This lead to the creation of Coren, the enemies you see in game, and the environment. Once everything was put together, it really didn't look that bad at all! I realized that as long as you can maintain a consistent theme, even very simple rudimentary shapes can appear as real parts of the world. It was the perfect example of how the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.

Speaking of the models, I realized there was another way to really bring them to life, by adding what I call "The Sauce" to them. Making the eyes look in the direction of movement, intermittent blinking, squinting when shrinking or hurt, making sound effects when damaged, making a happy face when beating a level,  flashing color text, these are all examples of "Sauce", or what others might call "Juice". These things make the game world feel good, they let the player feel like the game is responsive to their actions by tying visual and auditory stimuli to important game events. Although relatively minor individually, adding a lot of different kinds of "Sauce" to the character made him go from a simple blue cube to something so much more endearing. Furthemore, as someone who is better at coding than art, I felt much more in my element creating these little interactions than I did making the models, because some of them required some clever scripting. I had several of my friends playtest the game and most of their compliments were about these little actions. Which is great, because those were the most fun to code!

What Have I learned from this Experience

I've learned more than I am willing to write, but seriously it was an incredibly journey. I had to remember stuff I learned in college that I long forgot about, several programming concepts that I thought understood didn't really "sink in" until I had to apply them practically in this project. I had to learn things about 3d modeling that I didn't think I'd ever have to spend a neuron thinking about. I had to learn how to properly budget my energy, picking and choosing which features of the game were worth developing. I had to learn how to use video capture and editing software to make the game trailer, a process which took shamefully long for a 15 second video. But those weren't the most difficult things I had to learn. I had to think really hard and ask myself, how do you make a game fun? How do you design something that people you don't even know will enjoy? How do you make something that's worth other's time to play, when there's so much already out there for them to do? I'm not sure I've even learned the answer to this question, but I've certainly spared no effort trying to. Seeing the few people I had playtest the game respond positively, witnessing them react to the little details that I didn't think anyone would notice really made this little project all the more worthwhile. I'm proud of what I've made, and I've discovered that even if only a few people can extract some joy from my creation, that's satisfying enough for me.

So please check out Coren's run, toss it a buck if you're feeling generous, and leave me a comment if it gave you had fun!