An assignment for university where we designed and developed an indie game using industry standard workflows and software over a 12 week period. Our team consisted of one designer, three audio designers and two artists. A lack of programmers meant I had to dabble into scripting in Unity in order to build our project, as well as working together with the other audio students on music and sound.
Week 1
Week Commencing Monday 13th Sept
Week 1 consisted of us brainstorming as a group to come up with an achievable and original idea for our indie game. This started with a Miro mind map, in which we just threw random initial ideas at the wall until something struck us as a concept we would enjoy making.
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This then expanded into one huge mind-map outlining our entire idea, and any extra ideas we had on top of that.
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Of course, this had to be trimmed down and managed to fit into our expectation for what we could realistically pull off in the timeframe. We stripped some of our initial idea down, such as taking out a huge list of abilities in favour of one very well developed one. We also started a Trello board which we began to populate with a product backlog in order to keep track of the tasks required to bring this idea to fruition.



Week 2
Week Commencing Monday 20th Sept



The second week began with taking the huge collection of ideas on the Miro board and placing them into a Game Design Document. This allowed us to really think about the mechanics and the main design pillars of the game, and with this information we further refined the Trello backlog.
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As well as this, I began to prototype a character controller script, ending up with a character (just a cylinder for now!) that could move, jump and shoot, which kills the few -- currently motionless -- enemies on screen. I also programmed in a system that destroys bullets when they go off screen to ensure you don't accidentally kill enemies you haven't seen yet.
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Myself and my fellow audio students began to brainstorm ideas for a soundtrack, taking a guitar into our classroom to figure out the main chords of the background music.
Week 3
Week Commencing Monday 27th Sept
In week 3, I continued to refine the player controller, in order to allow more precise jumping for the platforming elements in he game. I ended up having a hard time fixing an issue where the player would become stuck in geometry and move incredibly slowly. I eventually sourced this back to an issue with the collider (it was a collider with rounded corners whereas the player prototype has a flat base).
Below is the updated player controller, with controls for moving mid-jump to better control their landing.

I also began further breaking down the audio needed for this game and who felt best suited to handling what tasks, alongside the other audio students - we created our own, more precise backlog to keep track of these tasks week on week, alongside notes in order to account for changes or issues that arise.
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Week 4
Week Commencing Monday 4th Oct
In the fourth week, I began working on enemy AI, giving them the ability to shoot towards an approaching player at a fixed rate. This meant I could also implement a player health and death mechanic. While testing this, I discovered there was still a huge glitch with the player controller. Sometimes, when pressing a direction in the air, the player would shoot off in that direction instead of the small amount I had attempted to program in.

After this, I turned my attention to that glitch that seemed to make the player rocket off the map. I narrowed this down to an error in the values that added force to the player while airborne, and managed to fix the jumping, this left me with a final player controller that would allow us to design the level around it.

I also scripted the insanity mechanic, where killing enemies increases your insanity - which makes you faster and do more damage, as well as allowing you to use your ability. I will be programming in this ability soon.
While playtesting the prototype, we decided it was simultaneously too easy to spam the shoot button and kill all the enemies, but also there was no way to avoid enemy fire. Because of this, we decided to add a reload and a shield mechanic. The reload forces the player’s gun to cool down, and the shield allows the player to stop a few incoming bullets in exchange for not being able to shoot.
Something I also programmed this week was a death pit, so if the player falls off the map they respawn at the start of the level.
Week 5
Week Commencing Monday 11th Oct
In the fifth week, I programmed in a shield system to allow the player to avoid taking damage. The shield can take 5 hits before it has to cool down for 3 seconds. This adds a layer of strategy and tactics to the gameplay, instead of just clicking to shoot and hoping you kill them before they kill you.


I also turned the level mock-up that our designer made into a full-scale level with placeholder shapes in place of assets, making a slightly more detailed sketch of what each section contained.

My sketch, based on the designers mockup.


Something else we started this week that was helpful was a weekly stand-up meeting where we discussed our goals for the week/sprint, and reflected on progress. This helps us plan week by week what parts of the backlog we need to prioritize to keep our workflow agile and adaptable.
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Finally, we used a studio space available to us to record voice-lines for both the cowboys and our player character, making sure to record multiple variations of each line. After this, we took the alien voice lines and manipulated them to sound like a different species, as well as attempted to further vary the cowboys using pitch and formant manipulation. This use of our own voices was perfect for an indie team as it meant we did not need to spend money on voice talent. However, it could potentially cause localisation issues later on as many of the lines are in English.
Week 6
Week Commencing Monday 18th Oct
In this week progress was a little slow from my side of things. I did some organisation of the assets in the level in order to keep it concise and accessible to the other team members.
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I also began working on the cowboy gun noises in the studio at university, recording and manipulating the sound of a book being dropped on the ground for the bang, and then utilising noise from a synth plugin to fill in the gaps. We spent a long time trying to find a good sound to recreate that classic spaghetti western bullet ricochet and that search took us from screaming frogs to bird noises and then eventually settled on a synth with a big pitch glide.
Week 7
Week Commencing Monday 1st Nov
In week 6, I began splicing the recorded voice lines into individual files for implementation into FMOD. I cut our modified voicelines for the player character and began importing them into FMOD, allowing me to start turning them into triggerable sound effects within the game.
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I also added Cinemachine (a camera control plugin included with Unity) into the project, allowing the camera to pan out for the boss fight and then go back to normal if the player dies. Following on from this, I edited the bullet collider to match this, so you can fight the boss from further away. Finally, I did further level maintenance, putting more assets into folders so the level is easier to break down.




Week 8/9
Weeks Commencing Monday 8th Nov & Monday 15th Nov
In these weeks, I started programming the final boss, beginning with a cutscene where the player cannot move for a few seconds. From the audio side, began splicing the cowboy voice lines into individual lines to be triggered. I then began using FMOD to implement the player and enemy voicelines and sounds.
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I spent several days making the boss fight feel unique to the rest of the game, giving it homing missile type bullets and a verticality that hasn’t been seen so far.
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Finally, we sent off a playtesting build in order to get some feedback on the gameplay and to polish and adapt. We wanted to do this with a few weeks still remaining in order to be sure that we could reprogram certain mechanics and rework things if we weren’t quite matching the needs of the consumer. This is where our agile methodology paid off, as we could take this feedback forward and improve the game.
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Week 10
Week Commencing Monday 22nd Nov
This week was a huge week in terms of completing the game! Using a set of premade assets, I finally gave our level real assets so it actually looks like you are in the Wild West.


After that, I took the feedback from the playtesting session and used it to fix some issues with the gameplay. This included fixing character movement in mid air (it is SO fluid now), fixing the jitteryness with moving platforms, and allowing the bosses to increase your insanity, thus making them a lot easier, as this was struggled on a lot in the playtesting.

Finally, I created and introduced several UI components to make the game easier to understand a, this included health bars for the bosses so you get more feedback when fighgint ghtme, another isssue people had in the feedback.

Week 11



Week Commencing Monday 29th Nov
Another big (and tiring) week of development. This was the final week of development, with next week being dedicated to ironing out any final bugs and publishing the game ready for the launch date of Tuesday the 7th.
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I spent the majority of the week implementing sounds with FMOD. Other than that, I produced the boss music and all of the UI sounds and then implemented them. This was a load of fun as I was able to make the boss music adapt to the stage of the boss fight.
Week 12 (& Final Reflections)
Week Commencing Monday 6th Dec
As mentioned before, this week was used to fix any final bugs still lingering in the game, and to publish the final build.
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Full Playthrough Video:
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In retrospect, there are several things I feel could have been better in the development of this project. Due to a lack of structure in meetings for the first half of the project, who was doing what was quite up in the air. This was helped by starting to do weekly standups to keep us on track in the sprint. We also had some issues with unplanned absences meaning we were lacking some of the assets, but I believe that we made the most of what we had and tied everything into a cohesive package regardless.
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In terms of my own personal contributions, I think that I contributed a huge amount to the project but I definitely could have structured my work better so it wasn't so staggered, and opened up more communication with my team to ensure I wasn't working alone. I believe my decisions in the audio side of things were well-informed for our indie workflow, and the audio ended up adding so much to the project once I implemented it properly.
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Overall, despite some bumps in the road, I believe this was a successful project that taught me many important lessons that I will carry with me into future projects.