Creating A Playable Game

John Scerri
Feb 12, 2017
2 min read

For the final task of psychology of play in the past semester, we had to design a playable game. I used to study 3D modelling and programming a couple of years ago, by looking for tutorials on the internet and finally it payed off. Me and my friend which also new how to do 3D modelling decided to take the challenge and try to create a digital game. Our theme for the game was metal models and we had only two to three weeks to work on. So, we decided to keep things simple ye effective. We never created a game this big before so obviously we had to jump some hurdles along the way.

One of the first problem that we encountered was importing models from Blender (2017) and Unity (2017). I already knew how to work with unity and Maya (Autodesk, 2017) since Unity supports Maya, but for Blender it was a complete different story. We first tried with obj files, but the mesh was being combined all the time. We than moved to fbx files where we managed to keep the mesh separated and grouped in the way he was creating it in Blender. Another problem we came across with was naming of models, groups, materials and textures. When I started learning Maya, the first thing I learned was to name everything, especially joints, groups and the mesh I self. On the other hand, my friend was not used to name things, so once imported into Unity I was struggling in animating to select stuff and specially to assign textures to materials since I had no idea which material was of which object and texture, since all I could read on all materials was “material 1”.

We managed to settle things out and learned a lot from the experience. Another problem was of lightmapping, and I still need to look it up in more depth in order to be able to fully understand what is happening. The problem was that lightmap backing was taking too long and if an error occurred during the process you have to restart from the beginning. This slowed us down, and had to reduce the quality in lightmaps in order to manage finish backing on time. I discovered that a lot of users are having trouble with this new version of Unity in lightmapping, but doing research on the subject helped me in learning using light probes, reflective probes and lighting modes (real time, baked, mixed).

I am sure that on our next game we will work much smoother and will settle some things out before we even start working. Like the types of file, we are going to use, naming system of objects and platform and resolution so we can decide better on sizing lightmaps. We look forward in creating another game since we worked very well and cooperated with each other seamlessly.