Tungsten Spores
Tungsten Spores was a group project completed during the academic year of 2023/2024. This project lasted for a total of 8 months where I, together with 5 other team members, underwent a full development life cycle of a game with a much broader scope than any of us had previously attempted. Tungsten Spores was the third collaborative games project I had personally worked on.
Tungsten Spores was developed using the Unity Engine and is a single player game.
Tungsten Spores is a third person survival shooter styled after an old Playstation 2 game.
My Contributions
At the start of development, the team was split into different roles depending on which disciplines we excelled in the most. For me, this meant I took on primarily the role of Designer, focusing on various areas of development including level design, environmental design, interface design and many other things.
With the designer role being focused mostly around the planning of implementation of these things, and due to the size of the team, I also undertook many artistic tasks such as animation as well as some programming tasks.
Art Specifics
All assets seen here are some examples of pieces I contributed. All of the assets were created and unwrapped using 3ds Max, and then textured using Adobe Substance 3D Painter. All 2D assets were created using Adobe Photoshop.
Using previous experience, I created a full architectural modular kit to be used for a level I personally designed. Additionally, to be mindful of performance, I included LOD’s for all props and environmental assets I created.
Our team lacked experience in the area of animation, and therefore I took it upon myself to fully animate every mesh that required it for the game using 3ds Max’ skin and bone workflow process. This included all player animations, which in a third person game are always very prevalent.
Programming Specifics
During the development of Tungsten Spores, the team frequently made use of pair programming techniques to help deal with errors and get things running correctly. I contributed to many different aspects of the game by doing this, however there are some pieces I completed on my own too such as the shop, the inventory, and the mini-map radar system*.
All code for this project was written in C#.
*the art completed for these assets were not created by me, only the code for their functionality.
Collaborative Games Production
Games Development is a large undertaking. For this reason, it is best completed with a team, and the strengths of having various people with different skills were highlighted throughout this project. Being able to sufficiently communicate ideas, collaborate work on assets, and handle inevitable problems are all valuable team skills that I have learnt from my work completed on Tungsten Spores. Additionally, we utilised Jira and Perforce for administrating tasks and version control, both of which are industry standard tools for large scale development. Tungsten Spores was a project that all in all, provided a lot of learning and insight into how to work effectively on games of larger scope.
