31263 / 32004 Introduction to Game Development
Assessment 3 and 4
Recreate a Classic Game
Overview:
Assessment 3 and 4 are two parts of a linked assessment. In these assessments you will recreate a specified classic Atari-era game by developing nearly all the assets yourself. The game will look and feel different to the original but will have the same core game design. You will then innovate on the game to push yourself-study skills and explore new game development topics on your own. These are individual assessments and it is expected that all the work done here is your own.
Primary Design and Development Constraints:
Regardless of the game that is chosen, there are some important constraints that must be adhered to:
1. You must use the Unity version that is used in the lab room and specified on Canvas.
2. The game must be made in 2D, using sprites.
3. Your final game (in Assessment 4) will have at least three scenes – one that is for the main menu, one that is a recreation of a level from the original game, and the last that shows off your design innovation. You may have more scenes in your project structure if you wish.
4. All visual assets must be entirely your own creation. These must be different in appearance to the original game and they must be your own designs so as not to infringe on copyright or trademark. I.e. do not draw existing characters from games, anime, movies, memes, etc.
5. You must have sprite animations in your game. You may also create your own particle system effects with 2D sprites.
6. Audio must be included for all major interactions in the game but the audio clips do NOT need to be your own creation. They must be different to the original game but you may source these from royalty-free audio websites.
7. All scripts in the game must be your own creation. You may use learning resources such as the Unity manual, forums, Unity Answers, and video tutorials, but you must not use any downloaded scripts from the Unity Asset Store, GitHub, or similar. Sophisticated plagiarism checking software will be used to ensure that your code has not been substantially copied from any single source, whether that is other students or online resources.
8. You may NOT use the Unity Rigidbody physics functionality or the standard Unity CharacterController component (or similar). Therefore, all motion must be coded by you as frame-rate independent continuous movement (see Week 5 lecture). If you have a Rigidbody or Rigidbody2D component on agameobject for the purposes of collision detection, it must be set to “Is Kinematic” at all times (or Body Type set to Kinematic if you are using a Rigidbody2D).
9. You MAY use the Tilemap functionality in Unity, though it is not required. You MAY NOT use the extra Tilemap Animated Tile functionality as it will cause issues in Assessment 4. For Assessment 3 Band 75% D, you should place any animated tiles manually, regardless of whether you used Tilemaps or not.
10. Assessments 4 stacks on Assessment 3 – anything you miss in Assessment 3 will likely affect your Assessment 4 grade as well.
Assessment 3 - 20%
Pac-man (PacStudent)
Visual Assets, Audio Assets, Level Layout, and Git
Reference Example:
For a reference example of Pac-man, goto Google and type “Pac-man” (
https://www.google.com/search?q=play+pacman+doodle). On the first page, you will find a
playable Google Doodle version of Pac-man that you can play in your web browser. This is the
reference that these specifications were built upon (other than the Level Generator). Features
found in other versions of Pac-man and Ms Pac-man are not included here. If a specific feature or design consideration isn’t mentioned, then you can use your own judgment to design it into the game – only what is listed in “Task and Grade Overview” below will be graded.
Due Dates:
Unity Project Files:
Due via Canvas before 11:59pm Friday 27th September
Deliverables:
Unity Project Files:
studentNumber_Assess3.zip
This is your entire Unity project folder (including your .git folder and .gitignore file),zipped up (as a .zip, no other format), with the specified naming convention. Before creating the zip, delete the “Library” folder.
Plagiarism Detection Software:
Sophisticated code plagiarism software will be used to check all code submissions in Assessment 3 and 4 with those of other students in the subject, submissions from previous years, and online sources. While learning from online tutorials and communities is strongly encouraged, there is a difference between learning code segments andre-implementing the included concepts or specific Unity API calls, versus plagiarising large chunks of code. A similarity score higher than 25% between a submitted project and any single other source will be further investigated by the Subject Coordinator and, where necessary, raised with the university as Student Misconduct. Additionally, visual and audio assets will be manually checked for originality by marking staff. Finally, you should not be using any assets, packages, or plugins other than those that come with the Unity Installation or that you have created yourself (except the audio assets). This includes any add-on packages found from websites like the Unity Asset Store.
Task and Grade Overview:
In Assessment 3, you will be assessed on the first half of the semester worth of lecture and lab content by preparing visual and audio assets for your game, setting up and beginning to use your Git repository, and planning for your future development. In this way, you will demonstrate not only foundational knowledge and skills in development, but also your ability to analyse an existing game, decompose it into a set of required assets and coded systems, and identify your own knowledge gaps for future development plans.
You should start from the top and work your way downwards. These tasks are stacked in terms of difficulty as well as completing requisite functionality before moving on to later functionality that utilizes this.
You must complete each grade band before moving onto the next. If there are major issues with an earlier section, we will not mark the later ones. E.g. If you don’t have any animation (you skipped that section), but you did make the level layout, we will not mark the level layout section. This is to encourage students to do good, consistent work throughout each section before moving onto the next and stopping students from thinking they can get easier grades by skipping steps.