Australian STEM Video Game Challenge

Creating an arena clearing first person 3D puzzle game 

In December of 2021 4 friends were gathered at an end of year party hosted by Ms Sun. In the previous semester 2 of them had attempted to complete a submission for the Australia STEM Video Game Competition but ultimately fell short. They were only taught the Unity game engine near the end of the semester and the deadline for the competition proved too tight. In reality, the competition actually expected your team to start work on the game around January to submit in August so starting to learn the engine in June wasn’t optimal. 

Despite this set back the 4 of us had now all completed the school’s 9/10 Programming course, which heavily focused on game development. December was the perfect time to organise a team as it was just before the start of the competition, and thus, Uh Oh Studios was formed. 

The theme for 2022 was Networks. We found the theme rather constricting and took a large portion of January to settle on an idea. In the end we settled on an arena clearing first person 3D puzzle game. Arenas can be beaten by completing a combat challenge inside them or a parkour challenge. The twist is that when an arena is cleared it also toggles a few of the other 5 arenas, turning the game into a puzzle of which order to complete rooms in. We called our game Nexus. 

We spent most of January coming up with the idea and solving issues with GitHub, namely CRLF related issues and longpath issues. Then in February we begun understanding the 3D engine by building robust player movement and dash. In March we began designing arenas. Our original plan for the game was around 25 arenas split into 3 networks. We scaled this down well before the end of the competition to 5 arenas in 1 network. This arena design as well as polish for the movement system continued into April. By May we begun setting up require in game systems like buttons you can walk up to an press, platforms that’s shake if you can’t stand on them, doors that open and close, player death and respawn, enemy shooting, pathfinding and entire arenas that were cleared by solving a puzzle. That last one was cut in the end. This also continued through June. In July, everything mentioned above that has since been cut, was cut. We radically reduced the game’s scope to a manageable amount. There were points where we thought we wouldn’t end up with something we could submit. Other than that, July’s main focus was polish. Music, sound effects, settings options, start and pause UI, win screen, bug fixes, texturing surfaces, responding to player feedback. It was the hardest crunch of the project, but we got it all done. 

The Australian STEM Video Game Challenge was the best introduction to indie game development we could have asked for. It’s loose timeline truly gave us the time to learn and create something impressive. I can now say I have experienced game development, bugs that seem impossible to solve, unimaginable crunch, rendering, coding, sound design. It has given me a whole new appreciation of the games I play. I couldn’t recommend the challenge more with a few words of advice. It will take longer than expected, it will be harder than you expect and it will feel easy at the start but it will not stay that way. 

As of writing we have been informed that our team is through to the third and final round of judging in the competition. However by the time this newsletter is published the winner might be announced. If you would like to read more about Nexus the you can read our Game Design Document or, if you would rather you can download the game here. Download everything into a zip file, then extract, then run the .exe file, just downloading the .exe file wont work. If you find any bugs in it, keep them to yourself. 

Update: We lost. Find out more about the winners: https://www.acer.org/au/discover/article/STEM-video-game-challenge-2022-winners

Next year myself along with the rest of Uh Oh Studios will be moving on to VCE studies and we have all decided that game development under such a deadline will be too much work. I would love to see an new batch of Northcote High School students enrolled in the competition and I know Ms Sun would. If that sounds interesting to you then come along to our weekly Tuesday meetings at downstairs B block. The competition for 2023 will start in December however if you don’t know Unity or want to prepare now is a good time to start.

Uh Oh Studio - Lachlan, Dylan, Simon and Alex, Year 10