3D Game Level 1 v1 Feedback

     This went very poorly. I thought that my DnD experience was going to be the worse, as I've never played it beforehand. But unity, that was a whole new ball game. This is by far the most complex game creation platform I had ever used, and I struggled deeply in grasping basic concepts and controls. Even after watching multiple tutorials, basic things like camera movement simply didn't stick. The controls were starkly contrasting those I've used in other applications. When following step by step the Kit guide, I still ran into major issues as the guide was not very descriptive in some areas; there were even comments from other users running into the same issues I was.

My point is that I had no experience and very basic understanding, if any, on how to use Unity. And this was clearly showcased in my first level. It technically did meet all the requirements and constraints, but no one would look at it and say it was mediocre, let alone good. What worried me the most was that to meet my own standards for this project would have taken me 10+ hours. I was not sure if this amount of input was suppose to be necessary have if I really did just suck at comprehending how to efficiently use Unity. The first big issue I ran besides the camera movement was regarding the enemies. After plopping one down, telling it what the "ground was", the enemy would be stagnant and frozen.

After roughly 15 minutes of frustration I realized that what I threw down was simply a individual animation file of sorts and did not include the rest of the creature (AI and other animations). The reason this caught me off guard was that it had a identical naming convention as the fully animated version. Failing to figure the most basics of organizing and finding files did not help my confidence in the project. One of the few things I can point out and say went "well", would be the acid lake, and the floating platform above it. This gave the player a very basic area to practice parkour and understand the gameplay element introduced by the acid.

The only other part that went smoothly was me resizing one of the enemies. I know it retrospect it might of seen very easy and simple, but it took me a few tries to alter the size without screwing up the animations. I was also able to increase the health of this unit to make it seem like more of a boss. The fun part about this was that unlike all the other enemies, which get one shotted by default, this one would have to be hit 3 times.

Another thing that went poorly was the play testing aspect. All my play testers were not hardcore gamers or particular tech savvy. So when they saw the level, they interpreted it more as a showcase of lots of code and skill to produce basic but nice looking models. In reality, all of this was created by the pre downloaded kit. The common thing that they all seemed to of like was how fluidly animated the playable character was (which was!), but this of course was not created by me.

To conclude, things were rather depressing in terms of progress and overall accomplishment. I don't need play testers in order to tell that the level of severely lacking in a multitude of ways. My goal is to keep practicing on Unity and hopefully resolve some of my current issues, while also learning new techniques for future levels as well.