Crep Topia Lives!

Remember Jade? She works with instructor Mike M. as part of Game-U’s New Jersey Accelerate program. For a while now, Jade’s been building a dungeon crawler from the ground up – creating models, animations, AIs (artificial intelligences), and more – but she recently passed an important milestone in her time at Game-U. Her game Crep Topia is published and available to play!

A lot goes into developing a playable game like Jade’s. She used the professional gaming engine, Unity, to assemble her project. While Unity offers a wide selection of prefabricated objects that can be imported into games, saving the developer time and effort, Jade preferred to take the harder route by creating her own assets in applications like Blender and Sculptris. Check out her player, beholder monster, and spinning witch! All of these characters were made by Jade outside of Unity as she learned the ins and outs of 3D modeling. When Jade imported these models into Unity, she also took it upon herself to learn layered and masked animations in order to give each model the dynamism she envisioned.

But her learning didn’t stop there! Because code, in one form or another, drives all game characters and mechanics, Jade worked in the C# programming language to build AIs for her enemies and responsive “brains” for her player and various interactable props. The props respond to game events, like collisions or health changes, to provide Crep Topia with more functionality and complexity. The knight player, on the other hand, receives commands from user input controls so that the gamer can cue the knight to move or attack. Jade also supplied the gamer with a user interface that includes a quit button. All of these features required her to master a number of challenging concepts and skills, and their presence in Crep Topiaproves she did so!

As the final step in the development process, Jade worked with instructor Mike to build and export her project in a format that the game sharing site, itch.io, could handle. Jade then created her product page, uploaded the files, and published her game! Crep Topia lives!

Amazing job, Jade! You’ve learned so much from your classes and you’re already putting that knowledge to good use. We’re all proud of what you’ve accomplished, and you should be too. Stay in touch as you begin your next development project. We’re excited to see where you go from here!