31263/32004

Assessment 4 - 35%

Complete PacStudent and Design Iteration

Due Dates:

Due via Canvas before 11:59pm Friday 1st November

Deliverables:

Unity Project Files:

studentNumber_A4_Project.zip

This is your entire Unity project folder (including your .git folder and .gitignore file),zipped up (as a .zip, no other format), with the specified naming convention. Before creating the zip, delete the “Library” folder.

Student Submission Declaration:

studentNumber_A4_Declaration.txt

A separate submission portal will be open on Canvas to submit a declaration. On this page, you will find  a  template  file  to  complete  and  then  submit.  This  template  will   be   similar  to  the Status_StudentsSubmission.txt files you have completed for each lab activity.

Extensions:

Extensions will only be granted in the case of extenuating circumstances. You must provide evidence of this, such as medical certificates, official letters, photos or video of incident, etc. That you have found the assessment hard or mismanaged you time is not an extenuating circumstance.

Extension  requests  should  be  sent  to  the   Subject   Coordinator  (william.raffe@uts.edu.au).  A maximum of 1 week extension can be granted (though the granted time will be proportional to the circumstances. For longer extensions, you must submit an official request for Special Consideration

(https://www.uts.edu.au/current-students/managing-your-course/classes-and- assessment/special-circumstances/special-consideration).

Plagiarism Detection Software:

Sophisticated code plagiarism software will be used to check all code submissions in Assessment 3 and 4 with those of other students in the subject, submissions from previous years, and online sources. While learning from online tutorials and communities is strongly encouraged, there is a difference between learning code segments andre-implementing the included concepts or specific Unity API calls, versus plagiarising large chunks of code. A similarity score higher than 25%  between a  submitted  project  and  any  single  other  source  will  be  further  investigated   by  the  Subject Coordinator and, where necessary, raised with the university as Student Misconduct. Additionally, visual and audio assets will be manually checked for originality by marking staff.

You should not be using any assets, packages, or plugins other than those that come with the Unity Installation or that you have created yourself (except the audio assets). This includes any add-on packages found from websites like the Unity Asset Store.

Task and Grade Overview:

In this assessment you are going to be extending upon what you started in Assessment 3 and making the complete PacStudent game. The table below is structured like the lab activities. You should start from the top and work your way downwards. These tasks are stacked in terms of difficulty as well as completing requisite functionality before moving on to later functionality that utilizes this.

You must complete each grade band before moving onto the next. If there are major issues with an earlier section, we will not mark the later ones. E.g. If have made some ghost behaviors but your PacStudent movement is barely working, you will only be marked up to the 70% C level. Likewise, if you skip all of the earlier steps and go straight to the 100% HD Design Iteration, then you will only be marked to the 30% Z level. This is to encourage students to do good, consistent work throughout each section before moving onto the next and stopping student’s from thinking they can get easier grades by skipping steps.

This assessment is meant to be challenging.

We do not expect everyone to aim for the 100% HD (or even the 90% HD or 80% D). We follow UTS policy  in  that  a  D  should  be  good  work,  HD  should  be  exceptional  work,  and  a  100%  HD  is outstanding or near perfect work. Thus, the 100% HD level in this assessment is there to encourage those that want to push themselves. Making games is hard, for everyone. It is a “rockstar” industry that attracts the best-of-the-best software engineers and artist or those with an unwavering passion for games. To succeed in this industry, you always need to be pushing yourself to be better and continue to learn new skills and solve previously unseen problems throughout your life. This subject is no different. We want our students to graduate this degree with as many skills as possible and preparing them for the competitive industry. No matter which degree you are in,  push yourself to the  highest  level  you  can  and  be  proud  of  whatever  personal  achievement  that  you  make  for yourself.

Penalties:

The below penalties have been added to discourage certain trends that we have noticed in student work in the past. These penalties can be applied to any level that you getup to, reducing your overall grade:

●    Red Compilation or Runtime Errors: If, when opening your projector when playing the game, there are any red errors in the Console Window, you will lose 2 points for each distinct error. This includes compilation errors, IndexOutOfRangeException, NullReferenceException, and others. This does not include Unity Engine errors, which usually come when you first open a project and will disappear if you hit the “Clear” button on the Console Window. We will not seek to break your game, so these errors should not appear in typical gameplay. You may think your game is fine with these errors, but it is not, it is very unsafe to leave them and seeing them in submitted work is a sign of an unprofessional developer. As soon as you see an error (or even a yellow warning) during your development, stop everything you are doing and fix it.

●   The entire game is on a UI Canvas: There are elements of this assessment that require you to use a UI Canvas. However, only those UI/HUD elements should be on the Canvas. You will lose 4 points if the level, characters, pellets, and bonus cherries are on a UI Canvas. If you completed Assessment 3 entirely on a UI Canvas, you will need to remove this andre-create your level in World Space as a collection of GameObjects.

●    Resources Folder and Resources.Load(): You will lose 4 points if the Resources folder and/or Resources.Load()  is  used for  anything  other than special circumstances  in the  100%  HD Design Iteration. Some of you have picked up the bad habit of using the Resources folder. This folder is meant for assets that are created at runtime, such as procedurally generated content or player made content, as well as some other rare cases. It should not be used to store sprites, audiofiles, prefabs, or any other typical game asset. This is because anything in the Resources folder:

o Must be manually unloaded from memory (e.g. Destroy() and Scene.Load() will not automatically free up the memory)

o Is kept in its raw form. and not compressed with the other game files, making your game larger (a big issue if you are distributing to a mobile store) and making it easier for your assets to be pirated.

o Causes  runtime  importing  of  the  assets.  When you  add  an  asset to  Unity,  it  is imported to the engine with the settings that can be seen in the Inspector Window. Doing this at runtime will just reduce the framerate of your game.