Intro

Kill the Giant is a project that was designed to give me more experience working within the Unity game engine. What I had initially planned as a week-long exercise eventually became a month-long effort, and my first completed game.

About

You wake up in a valley, and you are being chased. Run, hide, get a gun, and kill the giant.

Kill the Giant is a very simple game. It takes place in a dark valley surrounded by high peaks, and full of different biomes. At each corner of the map there is an item (3 of which are in caves). Roaming around the valley and constantly moving towards the player is a giant that tramples the player if it gets too close.

Development

The development began with brief planning phase where I outlined everything that I wanted to accomplish. The biggest targets were to understand Unity’s terrain system, fog system, and how to import models from Blender to Unity.

I started out by making a few quick models for terrain objects and the item pickups, and then a super low poly giant model. After I had all of the assets created I started working in Unity. From there I checked off the first two objectives fairly easily. The terrain system was easier to work with than I anticipated, as was the fog. The bulk of the work came while setting up a first person player that moved, was affected by gravity, and collided with the ground. All of this took much more effort than a 2D character.

The most frustrating work was in getting the giant to animate properly. This was my first time bringing an animation into Unity, and after overcoming a lot of issues by cross checking my work with tons of tutorials; eventually, I was able to get the giant to animate properly and move towards the player. Unfortunately, adding gravity came with too many bugs, so I just let him float. I then added code that let the player pick up items when the player was close enough. Once the player had 4 items, he obtained a gun. Finally, I wrote code for the giant’s health and damage, and with that the game was complete.

Retrospective

Kill the Giant holds a special place in my heart. It’s the first project that I brought all the way from concept to completion. I didn’t just accomplish all the goals I had set for myself, I went above and beyond. Is it perfect? Of course not! The enemy doesn’t have any gravity, there’s no sound, and not everything is textured. But when I had someone play and they said they felt spooked, I knew I had achieved what I wanted with this game.