How's It Growing

Source code
Build: WebGL (Hosted)

Summary

Goal: Give children ages 9-12 an overview of plant lifecycles in <15m.
Languages: C#, HLSL
Tech Stack: Unity Engine
Notable Achievement: Fully realised and deployed game.
Status: Completed

Completed Features (Hollow: multi-person contribution, Filled: Solo contribution)

State machine game state handler
Diegetic UI & input feedback [1]
Per-Character print dialogue system [4]
Custom inspector for creating plant data within inspector

Description

"How's It Growing" is a point-and-click educational game for 9-12 year olds built for the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra, Australia. This project was developed over a span of 8 weeks alongisde a team of 11 other people, including designers, artists, and other programmers. It was deployed to WebGL and intended to function well on chromebook devices.

Challenges

This project was my first major foray into working with a team, particularly one including multiple disciplines. It was initially challenging trying to organise and build a project while also adjusting to working with people I had for the most part just met. Additionally, the short time period introduced its own challenges particularly with testing and polishing the product.

Future considerations

The biggest issue during this project's development was the lack of time we had to playtest and iterate on mechanics. Once we did playtesting it was obvious some mechanics could be improved, but we lacked the time to be able to actually do so and perform a second round of playtesting. It cemented in my mind how important the iterative playtesting process was, and in future I'd hope to playtest earlier to allow for iteration time afterwards.