Historically, the programming tutorials we have on Learn teach coding by copying long reams of text from the website into an editor in order to build a game from scratch. I was excited to see if we could try something new to onboard users – provide a more complete game framework and have users learn coding by tweaking values and code ‘in-context’, learning how programming works by watching how the game itself changes! Finding a simple enough game that relied on changing values quickly led us to an Action RPG, like Diablo, where we could use items and inventories to show how values change the state of a game.
Seeing as most ARPGs revolve around hitting things to make stuff drop on the ground to be picked up, we were quickly faced with a common problem. As an educational project, depictions of violence and peril can often be an issue. We worked hard to find a fun and unique theme, eventually centering around a sherrif-gardener cleaning up the grouchy cacti infesting the town.
My amazing artists created a fun, vibrant, and highly optimized set of assets in just a few short weeks, with Lucy Bourn creating characters and environment, Stefano Guglielmana on animations and the wild-west playing card style UI, and Jack Tilling worked on all of the fun VFX and marketing material. Other than directing the entire project, I worked on various optimisations, lighting and post-processing, as well as introduing the team to new workflow and approaches for creating assets.
The project has been featured multiple times, most notably used in on-stage presentations to showcase Unity’s IAP features, where I built a whole set of 3d shop assets, implemented a new character, and created new UI in just a day.
