Game Project: Get The Memo

For the past few months, a few friends and I have been working on a video game called Get The Memo (GitHub). From our official description:

“Get the Memo” is a first-person dystopian role-playing game set in the imposing corporation Big Corp., which is overseen by an intimidating boss. Play as an aspiring intern in their first week on the job, where you'll navigate through a maze of unassuming cubicles, combat sentient office supplies, and climb the corporate ladder

Cover

We developed the game for a game project competition that took place in our state! In total, we worked on the project for seven months! My favorite part was working on a team, especially with people who don't code. On our team, we had people for:

  • 3D modeling
  • Writing
  • 2D art
  • Marketing
  • Documentation of process
  • and more!

Communicating with everyone and taking full advantage of their talents was a big challenge, and I think that game development is unique in that respect. Games are the intersection of so many different crafts, programming included, which makes working on a team difficult but in a good, challenging way!

Programming

I can't say that I like writing game code, but certainly teaches some good lessons! We wrote the game in Unity, and the main struggle was decoupling our components. In video games, coupling is so easy, since everything in the world can interact in so many different ways. One "solution" is global state, but that doesn't usually end well...

On that note, I'm thinking about writing a post about using events for decoupling components in Unity, as I believe they are the most effective solution to coupling, and they mesh (no pun intended) especially well with Unity's component-based system. Although, I'm far from an expert in game development, the post might be helpful for people without ton of experience such as myself.

Also, I wasn't a huge fan of C#. Compared to Rust, there are very few static guarantees. I think being able to analyze a program statically is useful for games, since there are so many independent variables and combinations of state. I've (very recently) been coming back to Rust, which has been really nice.

Final Thoughts

Working on Get The Memo was overall a great experience. Being on a team with talented artists and musicians was unique and presented many challenges! The game we made won the award for best art and assets! That included overall visual design, which I spent a long time on (graphics programming is hard!).

We competed in the same state competition last year, with Roadent Rampage, and our game was much better this time around! Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my reflections on Get The Memo. I didn't show much gameplay, but you can go to the game's GitHub repository for that kind of content. As always, let me know on this blog's GitHub repo if there are any issues!