a still from my project
In my junior and senior year of high school, I was a student at Freestyle Academy, a digital arts program embedded into my high school district. At the end of our senior year, every student took on the Zenith Project, a major cumulative project over two months where students had complete creative freedom to choose what they wanted to learn and/or create in their last few months. I chose to create a mini 3D video game using the Unity Engine! I found this project as a great way to combine my creative, storytelling side with the academic, STEM side of me.
an uncut tour of my mini-game
Prior to the Zenith Project, I'd never used the Unity Engine. Choosing to learn an entirely new application in such a small time frame was definitely a daunting and risky task. It was inevitable that I ran into many technical issues in Unity during my project, such as collisions not working properly or code not running as it should. From a lot of these obstacles, I learned how to better use my resources to find what was wrong with my game and was able to problem solve each of my issues. I definitely will carry my Unity experience into my future projects, as I really enjoyed using it and playing around with its features.
Although the bulk of my project was spent learning something new, I was still able to leverage some of the skills I'd learned at Freestyle through the making of my game's main character. I used Maya, ZBrush, and Substance Painter to create a cute astronaut character that the player controls.
Modeling in Maya
Detailing in ZBrush
Texturing in Substance Painter
Animating in Unity
Making this game was definitely easier said than done, but I’m really proud of what I produced and the skills that I developed through this process! Although it isn't a full-fledged game with levels, quests, or objectives, I still really love the story I attributed to the terrain and the exploratory theme I gave my game. Above are a couple stills from my game. Check out the video below to see more into my process!
