Itch.io Game Page

Production Plan

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“Fly High Fishing” is a VR fantasy bow-fishing game set within a hot air balloon high above the clouds. The player’s task is to catch as many fish as they can with their bow & arrow before the timer runs out.

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Game Genre

VR, Single Player, Archery, Arcade

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Platform

Windows PC (Itch.io)

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Engine

Unity

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Time Spent on Project

June 6th 2022 - July 11th 2022 (4 weeks)

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My Role(s)

Lead Designer

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Software I Used

Unity, Photoshop, Discord, Trello, Google Drive, 7-zip, ScreenToGif, Visual Studio, Perforce, Google Docs and Google Sheets

Gameplay Summary

You play a 5 minute game where your goal is to try and catch as many fish as possible. Different fish net different points. The idea is that the game works best when multiple players play the game taking it in turns and trying to beat each-others score. 

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My Overview of the Project

For this project there were 3 designers (including myself), 3 artists and 3 programmers. This project was something very new to me as I had never even played a VR game before working on it. There were many new concepts that I had to learn due to this fact in order to ensure that users would not get motion sickness or overwhelmed with a crowded HUD or play-space. I am very proud of how this project turned out considering the short 4-week timeframe to make the game from start to finish and I believe that it gave me both the opportunity to learn more about Virtual Reality and how to design games for this platform. It also taught me how to work with team members for testing purposes (as I did not have an Oculus VR headset and others in the team did). 

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My Contributions

• Created a detailed production plan document

• Created Asset list for designers 

• Created particle effects (these did not end up being used in final product) 

• Created UI mockups for menus and tutorial

• Tested the game for bugs and to tweak variables to adjust difficulty and make the game more fun

• Helped to make design decisions during group meetings

• Kept a detailed notes of all important things said within meeting in a "meeting notes" document

• Created materials for the textures that artists provided to work with the fish shader

• Created a fresnel shader for the fish to make them glow and pulse

• Experimented and implemented different post processing effects and bloom for the final build

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Highlights and Lowlights

I was very impressed with the artists on how well a job they did on creating the look and feel of this game, the highlight for me was not just the design of the game but how stunning it is to look at as well. The thing that I felt most regrettable about was our team communication and time management. Usually in other projects this has gone much better however during this project the team was very hard to communicate with and we had lots of arguments over decisions that needed to be made about the game. Due to this however, I have learnt to be more democratic in decisions and to make sure that all group members have a say in discussions to ensure that everyone is heard, and nobody feels left out or ignored.

 

What I learnt

This project taught me how to better deal with approaching the team with ideas in a way that did not sound dismissive of their own. Throughout this project I was often misunderstood in my suggestions and criticisms and in future projects I aim to improve in this field. I also learnt that not everyone is easy to work with and that I must be flexible to account for many different personalities, remain calm at all times and to try my hardest to uphold an amicable team relationship for the sake of the project, even when there may be disagreeances about some things in the game. During the project often when we struck a disagreement on mechanics or design decisions, we would hold a vote as a team to decide on the way that most people felt was best in order to move forward. Overall, this project was an amazing learning experience where I learnt lots of new design principles specifically relating to VR and overcame difficulties as they presented themselves such as members being sick, having to test the game via other team members and rescoping the project to have a completed game in time for the deadline.

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