Monthly Archives: December 2017

Incomplete teams: Managing student projects with incomplete skillsets

It happens: sometimes you get a student team that doesn’t have a major skillset usually needed to make a game. Not that it’s impossible, but it means the team mentor has to consider what to do to make sure they are able to get a game out.

Now that’s actually not impossible: there are one-person games out there, and my previous research did focus on ensuring designers could survive a worst-case scenario of having no one to work with. With regard to student projects though, there’s a specific goal: the game has to showcase the students ability to conceive, plan, develop and finish a project.

Here are two student teams that had this problem that asked me for mentoring. Continue reading

Building a procedural city generator in Unity

Hilmyworks' Procedural City Generation on December 4th, 2017
December 4th, 2017

Was trying various projects with Unity to understand the engine back in 2016, so the procedural generation project was put on hold until late 2017. The version on December 4th, 2017 shown below was composed of stacked generated cubes of various materials, with a random placed object from a set of Gameobjects placed on top.

This was obviously non-performant, but my goal back then was to identify the rules I needed to establish to make a generated city believable. This version was to test if I could generate various window patterns on the wall surfaces and have the code randomly place objects as needed. There were observable issues – e.g. middle bottom building has windows that occur in one corner and not the other – but seeing issues like that meant I can figure out new rules to fix them.