Zachary Sally
University of Central Florida
Overview
Grove Escape 1985 is a single-player puzzle game designed to get people familiar with the Central Florida Tech Grove by making the building an escape room. This game was created during the 2023 Armed Forces Jam, a 48-hour rapid prototyping game/simulation event for the Armed Forces. One of the special challenges of the 2023 Armed Forces Jam was to make an escape room using a digital twin of the Central Florida Tech Grove.
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I worked with a team consisting of 3 programmers and 3 artists during this event. At the end of the event, our game won 2nd place out of the 12 games submitted, and also won the Best Escape Room special bounty.
What I Contributed
I was responsible for designing and coding the garage section of the game, which consisted of 2 unique puzzles. The first puzzle has the player find 3 fuses scattered around the building to power on the circuit breaker. The second puzzle has the player flip switches in a control panel in order to get to the optimal power levels. I worked with the 3 artists to integrate unique models and animations for each puzzle. These two puzzles were integrated with the interact and progression systems in order to create a fully functional gameplay loop.
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I was also responsible for the audio in the game. I recorded, edited, and imported audio clips, developed a sound manager class, and designed a system where I could instantiate the audio clips when an event occurs and destroy the audio clips when they have finished playing.
Encountered Problems and Solutions
Working with a New Teammate with Little Experience
Problem: I was in a team with my fellow coworkers. However, we decided to bring in a last minute programmer join our team. He was fairly new to working with Unity and C#, so I had to spend time working with him to learn about programming and team collaboration.
Solution: I decided to spend much of my time in the first half of the game jam by teaching him how to use tools like Git and find tutorials on how to do his assigned tasks. Once I showed him the general workflow, I let him try it for himself. Once he started getting more familiar with the tools, he started going off on his own. I advised him to try and communicate when he decided to push and merge, but sometimes he did not.
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Despite some early communication problems and merge conflicts, I continuously taught him the best practices when dealing with a team and source control, such as utilizing separate scenes to develop and test before merging the systems into the main scene. In the end, he had create a vital part of the game, and we ended up winning 2nd place due to his work.
What I Learned: I was able to apply my skills in technical communication and project management to support someone who was just starting to learn. This directly led the team to completing our winning game.