B2 Bachelor Dolly's House Light and Shadows in video games

“It has to be cool.” - this is the standard we were set to fulfill.

Thus, we did not just use light to make the game visually appealing, but also centered a huge amount of gameplay around utilizing light. One of our main priorities was challenging players with puzzles that use different light mechanics in diverse ways. For instance, to light up a completely dark room or by coloring objects with the help of RGB-colored spotlights. To achieve our goals, we used the Unity Game Engine as well as its build in HDRP Render-Pipeline.

We had the idea, way before the semester began. The development started after we were officially put together into a team of seven. During development, we utilized weekly meetings to organize the team and upcoming tasks. These meetings helped us to get to know each other and discuss the game’s current status. Additionally, we had one extra weekly meeting with Prof. Lenz to show him our current progress. There he was able to stress-test the game and find missing game-mechanics as well as all absent object-colliders. (He is phenomenal at this!) We used these insights to plan and distribute our weekly goals and tasks.

We divided our team into two sub-groups: art and programming. The art team was tasked with creating concept art, assets, model, textures, materials and laying out as well as designing levels. Meanwhile, the programming team was responsible for implementing AI, level loading systems, and core game logic. However, these roles were flexible - team members were encouraged to collaborate across teams with one another and to test out different design-approaches. This allowed programmers to contribute to art tasks and artists to support programming when needed. Due to the topic of our game being “light and shadows” we spend a lot of time testing out different light-setups inside Unity’s virtual environment. In addition, we modelled and textured many of the game’s assets ourselves to better fit the overall atmosphere we created.

We are a team of seven highly motivated IMI-Students. Our backgrounds are as diverse as our personalities and passions: While some of us are very fond of art, others are purely interested in the technical side. But what unites us is our shared passion for game development and interactive story-telling.

Farel Alfarizi Hasan

“Can anyone remind me again to fix the texture error Winston told me to fix 15 commits ago?”

Jessica Wiecha

“The rig behaves normally… until midnight.”

Kartik Kushwaha

“Designed the levels, so you regret every step.”

Linh Vuong

“I love it when the most irrelevant asset just casually has over 2 million vertexes.”

Max

“These bugs keep appearing and I am starting to run out of bug spray…”

Malte Szemlics

“Every time I fix the mesh, three new problems spawn. It’s like hydra, but for edge loops.”

Winston John Reichelt

“Hi, I’m Winston. They call me the ‘Triangle Police’.”