Periodicity: Your Chemical Romance
Game made in 4 weeks as a final for a game design course. Worked in a team of 5 where I was in charge of project management and initial programming. 2D game using the Unity engine with the Fungus Plugin, visual novel based educational dating simulator.
Periodicity: Your Chemical Romance is aimed at helping teach people chemistry concepts. The game features personified chemical elements with the goal of scoring a date with one of them by the end of the playthrough. At the beginning of every day, the player is given a lecture about a chemistry topic. Each time they wish to talk to someone, they must answer a question that surrounds that day’s topic. If the player does not answer the question correctly, they’re unable to interact with that character for the day.
Project Post Mortem
What would you do if you had more time?
Our group was blessed with having plenty of time & dedication. We were able to do everything we anticipated & more due to one of our members going above & beyond with development. If we had more time I would love to see this game become a fully-realized tool for teaching people about chemistry. Expanding the content to have more days & teaching more advanced chemistry concepts would be a great way to add educational content to the game. It would also be good to test our educational content with player testing & make sure we’re hitting the educational content.
What would you do differently next time?
Next time I think it would be better to start off with making sure everyone was on the same page & had clear expectations for the end result. Since we started with people not being on the same page, some work had to get scrapped or modified in order to accommodate the end result. As most things boil down to, improving the group communication would have made for a more cohesive vision that everyone had a hand in.
What did you learn?
I was able to refresh my memory of the Unity Engine as well as learn a new plugin, Fungus. I will definitely be using Fungus in the future for any projects of a similar concept. I was also able to learn to better manage expectations in a group of people with various ideas & skill sets. Being flexible in project management is an important skill that I feel I get better any with each group project I take part in. I’m happy to be in an environment where I’m able to constantly learn & grow.