Clean Your Room
Clean Your Room is a First Person cleaning game where the player is presented with a timed challenge to clean up all the objects in the game world. Do you have what it takes to clean up all the objects before time is up?
Download link to game:
Clean Your Room was built using Unreal Engine 4 and Audacity.
Clean Your Room was created from a game design document from a college course I took at Southern New Hampshire University. The skills that this project demonstrate is my ability to follow direction from a game design document, play test, debug, properly annotate/keep logs of game versions/changes, and design functioning in-game UI.
FAQ
How would you describe the process of creating and polishing this project?
The process of creating this project can be explained in steps. The first step was to go over the game design document that was provided for me and to write down game concepts that would fit the required specifications. After that, it was a matter of prototyping with basic mechanics in Unreal Engine 4. After The basic mechanics were down, all that was left was world building, mechanic enhancement, and polishing. When I went to polish this project, it had been about 6 months since I last worked on it, so polishing and adding to it was super easy due to more growth in game development skills. I also kept up with all my traceability and task logs that I created in order to demonstrate my ability to stay on track and keep an eye on what certain changes did for development.
What did you learn as you were creating and improving this project?
In the creation of this project I learned two major skills. I learned the importance of keeping to a game design document. I also learned that keeping a task log and traceability matrix can be very motivating and organized when it comes to game updates and time management. Learning how to plan mechanics and additions, alongside of the requirements in the document, ahead of time made it so I remained focused on how to proceed in working on this project.
What challenges did you face?
The challenge that I faced in this project was creating new mechanics that no tutorial really covers. For this project, this would be the bomb pile item. I had no prior knowledge on how to spawn in new items off of another item and through experimentation and putting my mind into "programmer" mode, I was able to accomplish this challenge without any online assistance. This was a very proud moment in my programming career because it was one of the first times that I relied on my knowledge of programming to complete what I set out to do without assistance.
How did you incorporate feedback as you made changes to the project?
Feedback is very important when it comes to making a game fun for players. I had my spouse play this game and see mentioned the lack of music and noted that the game didn't feel challenging to play. Even though the game design document mentioned that the game was for children online, I made it so that the game was a perfect balance between challenging and easy. I also implemented music and better textures due to feedback.
How was the project improved?
The main changes that I wanted to touch on whenever revisiting this project was to create the new bomb pile object and having them randomly spawn in. The new bomb pile object improves the game by adding a new layer of difficulty because interacting with the bomb pile makes it so more items spawn around it, meaning more mess that needs cleaned up. This was in the requirements for the game design document and I finally was able to get it implemented correctly.
