Shred Mountain: White Out

Shred Mountain: White out is a 3D snowboarding collectathon game built in Unity where you explore a wide mountain slope with branching paths and hidden routes. Over multiple attempts to reach the mountain's base, the player collects trash which they can spend on upgrades or unlocking areas farther down the mountain.

What I Did:

Shred Mountain was made for the third project in MI445 Game Design and Development I. It was developed as a team of six, and we had roughly six weeks to create a game idea and design, the art assets, the scripts, and the sounds. I worked on the project as a programmer, and spent the majority of my time creating the movement mechanics and fine-tuning them. I also contributed to the UI, the trick system, and collision detection. 

What I Learned: 

The smaller tasks came after the movement, which was a big chokepoint for a long time in the project. I was able to immediately create a snowboard controller, but it was extremely rigid and was not fun to control whatsoever. I knew I would need to program the movement before anything else so that our level designer could start work on the mountain slope, so I worked for awhile to fine-tune the movement. I ended up creating two or three different movement systems before we found one that worked well, and then I spent even more time bug-fixing that movement to perfect it. Overall, I certainly could have pivoted off of the movement programming earlier to work on other essential tasks, but thankfully those other tasks were quick and simple, so the project progressed relatively well. At the end of the semester, Shred Mountain was voted Most Fun by a board of alumni, instructors, and other students in the class, and was also featured in the MSU Game Dev Fall 2022 Showcase, so our team finished the course with an excellent game!

Future Improvements: 

The team wanted to create a fast-paced, action snowboarder. We had plans for some more movement mechanics like a grappling hook (this was mostly at my request), which were scrapped for time. These mechanics could have made the game feel more fast paced and difficult, but we knew from the start that they were low-priority stretch goals. MI445 has two projects that put developers in teams with other experienced artists, designers, programmers, and audio developers, and I always love working with talented students that can elevate games that I work on. Other games on this portfolio showcase my skillset in programming, and are pretty fun to play, but Shred Mountain is the most "complete" game I've worked on thus far.

For more info, or to play the game: Download the game on my Itch.io page!