Garden of Taozi
I joined this game’s production very early in its development as a new programmer who had little experience in Unity. Many core aspects of the game were unfortunately in need of a complete rework, but the process of salvaging and rebuilding a game from the ground up was a great learning experience and allowed me to work on a lot of key game mechanics. The following are some of my major contributions to the game.
Collectibles
I created the two kinds of collectibles for this game: peaches and scrolls. Peaches are tracked by a level manager to ensure all are collected before the level’s exit door is unlocked. Scrolls are collectibles which unfurl to display a UI page where the player can read text about the original legend of Sun Wukong, serving as codex entries which fill in the backstory of the game.
Player Movement and Collision
With the game’s grid-based movement system needing to be reworked, I came up with the idea to have a probe object extend from the player before each movement, which would check for collisions and report back whether or not the player could move in that direction. If the player could not move, a short animation would indicate there was something in the way. Importantly, this system accounted for collectibles and other non-collision objects by having the probe check for their unique tag during its collision detection.
Isometric Camera
In order to create the isometric camera for this game, I utilized the Cinemachine package, which gave me some useful experience in using Unity packages and studying documentation. I learned how to apply constraints on the camera’s movement to prevent it from moving out of bounds and I helped implement shifting camera angles at specific points across each level, which provided a better view of some areas. In the end, I created a well-documented and easy to use camera prefab.