Coolor

Room with large stone walls, looking at six colored cubes. From left to right, they are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. On the right, you are holding a black gun with two blank white cubes on it.

Project Summary

Coolor is a short puzzle game inspired by The Talos Principle and Portal, built around placing and mixing colors. The final game takes about 10-20 minutes to play through, and consists of five levels.

My Contribution

For this game, I was working alongside four other Computer Science majors, and so we all shared the task of writing the code for the game, as well as working on some of the visuals.

Some of my specific contributions include:

Developed a crosshair for the HUD that shows the color makeup of the object you're looking at using a Raycast.
Integrated features that my teammates had developed, allowing them to interact with each other.
Created the first-person player controller with the ability to walk, run, and jump.

Accomplishments

Robust Design

I would say our main accomplishment was creating a polished, hard-to-cheat experience. Our puzzles were designed to prevent exploits, and we found several glitches and workarounds that we were able to patch and make impossible.

Effective Brainstorming

Initially, our team was having trouble brainstorming and making decisions together. A lot of ideas were getting shut down quickly, so people stopped sharing what they thought. To help with that, I suggested that we all come up with a few ideas for interesting game mechanics over the weekend, and then on Monday we would present them one by one.

That Monday, we were much more successful. Having more time and an organized way of sharing gave everyone a chance to think deeply about their ideas, and then present them compellingly. Every single member of the team contributed valuable ideas that made it into the final game in some form. This is probably the one thing from this project that I am most proud of, and feel like I learned the most from.

Shortcomings

I would say our biggest shortcoming was planning. We didn't follow our timelines closely, and struggled to delegate responsibilities effectively. If one of the team members wasn't in class, decisions ended up being made by whoever was instead of the whole team.

What I Learned

The most valuable things I learned during this project pertain to working with groups:

A tiny bit of structure can go a long way, and balance out the team dynamics. I've learned it's often a good idea to have a producer on your team, whose main job is to focus on creating structure.
Bring up problems early, and constructively.
Don't be overly attached to your own ideas and code. Focus on what is going to be best for the project, even if it means replacing your idea with someone else's.

Future Goals

Sometimes, I can be a little bit of a perfectionist. I also came into this project with prior Unity experience, and so I made a purposeful effort to not take over. In hindsight, I should have made more suggestions when it came to our group's organization. Next time, I would push for more structured planning and better organization of responsibilities.

All work