Anima
Anima is a short 3D bullet hell game jam game I am currently working on to familiarize myself with Unity and level design. The prototype on display here was completed in less than a week by myself.
Project Info:
- Role: Game Programmer, Designer, 3D Artist
- Timeline: 1 Week, September 2025
- Team Size: 1
Tools/Skills: Unity, C#, Blender, Low-poly Modeling, Animation, Level Design
Problem: The challenge with this project was to take my learning from a Unity course and translate it into my own project while also practicing my level design skills.
Process: In this game, psychic slugs have taken over the forest corrupting and killing it. The forest creates the player as a spiritual guardian as a last effort to cleanse the corruption. To create a sense of tension for the player I decided to make the main source of combat for the player melee, meaning they had to get close to enemies that could shoot from a range. To create an engaging loop, when attacking enemies a shard may spawn and when enough are collected the player has the ability to parry incoming bullets or shoot a high damaging ranged attack. Most of my implementations for UI, bullets, enemy nav meshes, etc. were inspired by the information I had learned from the Unity course.
Learnings: This was the first time I attempted to fully design a level using Blender. The workflow turned out to be much quicker than I had anticipated. Previously I would use very rough in-engine primitives to design my levels, so gaining confidence with level blockouts in the future will be a valuable skill. One of the most important takeaways from the course I had taken on Unity was the importance of using prefabs. This project has solidified their power and how helpful they are. The hardest thing I have had to deal with so far with this project is Unity’s built in character controller component. My character was able to slowly walk up sloped walls regardless of their steepness. I still have not found a proper solution for this issue and currently have a rough manual solution that works well enough but is not ideal.
