Synthetic Existence Unity Project

What is it: Synthetic Existence is a turn based RPG made in Unity by me and four other Full Sail students. My main responsibility was to write all the AI in the combat portions of the game. I also took care of other miscellaneous tasks such as ensuring player data was saved between levels and creating several particle systems that would appear during combat.

What went right: This game was my first exposure to Unity and my first exposure to making a game with a team, so the experience this project gave me was invaluable. I still remember the pure felling of joy I felt when I first got an AI cube to move around the arena like a chess piece. Since the AI would move in a very specific away around the grid, I couldn’t just bake a navmesh and call it a day, I would have to write all the path finding myself. I used raycasts to make the enemies detect obstacles, an enemy manager class that each enemy could use to see where there teammates were located, and I gave each space on the battle grid a value so the enemy could decide what the best move would be. I also created a battle manager that worked as a mediator class for both the enemies and the players so they knew when it was their turn in combat. I also made the final boss of our game that used a very simple state machine to switch between attacks. This state machine used player position and the boss’s current health as criteria for when to switch states. Writing all the code for combat was a real challenge that forced me to think in new ways to come up with smart solutions, but I still had a blast making it and I always felt like a better programmer after each task was completed.

The final boss, about to launch rockets at the player's team

What went wrong: The biggest problem with our game was as a concept, it was confusing and way out of scope for a game that would be made in 3 months. From day 1 we were never able to decide what the main focus of our game would be. Would it be the combat system? Would it be managing resources? Would it be a class system? These are all interesting ideas that were pitched throughout production and we never dedicated our time to focus on one of them. The other issue was that we tried to fit way too much into 3 months. We had a turn based combat system, leveling up system, class system, inventory system, multiple enemies and a boss battle, a team member system, and many other miscellaneous systems we wanted to squeeze into our game. We would have been much better off thinking of one system we could have built off of and putting all our time and effort into that.

The game's opening message telling the player their goal

Conclusion: Although I wish we would’ve had some extra time to polish the gameplay and make the game more visually appealing, the experience of making this game isn’t something I would ever trade. I learned a lot about working with a team, using Unity, and building AI and these lessons will serve as building blocks for me going forward. If you’re interested in playing this game you can do so with this link: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/715942