Casa Del Bicho

On a hot, long summer day, the residents of Casa del Bicho were working through the day until a great darkness loomed over the village. All of a sudden, a thunderous crack overtook the tiny bug village and left the town in ruin. With the townhall and part of the village destroyed, the bug villagers are in need of help to rebuild and recover from this devastation, the Great Breakening.

Your quest does not end there. After the Great Breakening, word has it a strange temple has appeared. The villagers need your help in exploring this curious remnant in understanding what caused such devastation upon Casa del Bicho.

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Controls:

WASD to move

Space to jump

Left Mouse Click to interact

I key to open inventory

ESC key to pause game

How to Play:

As an exploration game, your job is to explore the environment around you and help the villagers in Casa Del Bicho. Interact with different bugs and craft specific items to move the story along.

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Postmortem:

What went right? We had a goal to make a beautiful story driven adventure game, and we can confidently say we ticked this box to the fullest. Our final product has an amazing aesthetic, a wonderful story, and a beautiful fairytale-style terrain. The fact that we even completed a project this ambitious is a huge win for our team and did not come easy.

What went wrong? 

While we did end up with an amazing story driven game that looks and feels good to play, our game now is very different from our initial design document. What started as minor changes to the terrain and story evolved into full blown reworks on multiple occasions. Our terrain saw 3 different versions and our story has been rewritten so many times it feels distant from our original idea. But all of this was for the better and these revised versions allowed for us to grow and learn as a team. We also encountered coding errors. Two crafting systems later, along with a few state machine redesigns, we ended up with something we were happy with. There was also a fair share of Git issues, Unity nonsense, and a small sprinkle of full-blown windows 10 meltdowns. All in all, our success was not found without struggle, but that struggle made the final product better and better.

How we fixed it.

One of the staple issues of our project was the terrain. On multiple occasions it was rebuilt from the ground up due to miss-matched Unity versions, terrain tool errors, and general discontent with product quality. The story was an ever-changing process as well, but thanks to having a film major on our team, the story was able to flex as our project did. We also learned that inventory and crafting systems are more difficult to implement than led on, and after trying to figure out why items were not staying in our inventory for days on end, we decided to fully rework our crafting system from the ground up to get our system to what it is today. Our state machine issues were less issues and more learning moments. As our game got more complex, so did our states. It soon became the obvious option to rework it on multiple occasions just to keep it up to speed with the rest of the game. The issues we encountered with Git were mainly merge conflict issues, with took some time to resolve through Git bash. Most of our Unity problems were due to version mismatch, with we were able to solve once we got everyone working in the right version of Unity. We were also very fortunate that through two windows 10 meltdowns in our group we lost no data or assets due to our use of GitHub and Discord to organize our assets and materials for the game.

What did we learn? 

We came into this course and project with a rudimentary understanding of Unity, Blender, and C#. We are now leaving this course with a solid understanding of Unity and its systems, a few of our groupmates have mastered Blender, and I think we are all better at C#. From individual Unity tools, to assets, to music, to game systems; our team has seen progress as game developers at every turn. We have all grown as game developers and as teammates. 

Team Members:

Avery Devlin
Joseph Fabian
Aidan Fyfe
Orion Dobos
Faith Popov
Summer Gautier