Kindling

Kindling was my second big game project that I worked on for school. Unlike the first one this one was specifically meant to be an “Alt” game. These games had to have a message behind them, my team chose to have a game with a message about social impact. Kindling was a game about people who are diagnosed with Chronic-Fatigue Syndrome. It was also the first project I worked on in Unity. While I wasn’t given a specific role per say I would often do the work of whatever roles were lacking or needed help. Meaning on this project I worked as a Producer, 3D Artist, and Environmental Artist.

Because this was one of two small projects I worked on, specifically only having 5 team members, I had to sharpen many skills that I had only learned a bit about. Mainly that of 3D modeling. I had only taken one class on the subject and hadn’t used many of those skills up until now. It was a fun learning experience seeing everything I could do in Maya and how to import those objects into the game. It was quite a learning experience.

As we went through the project, I also had to learn how to use the Unity engines tools to construct the player level, and how the scene was set up. Luckily for me Unity has a great land sculpting and painting tool that made the process quite easy. I still had to find ways to get the land looking flat in some areas for us to build the town. With the help of one of the other devs on my team I would like to believe that we made the town look good for the game.

Of course, we had hurdles throughout the development process. Since there wasn’t one assigned producer on the project, we did have a few issues with communication of who was working on what. This led to some issues, but overall, with the game being a small five-person project this never really got in the way.

During my time on Kindling, I learned how to quickly develop skills that are needed for the development process. Small things that I didn’t think I would use. This also taught me the importance of communication. Though we had no major problems it would have made the process easier.