Super Maya is a platforming adventure game crafted with inspiration from the Lebanese popstar Maya Diab. One of her popular music videos is animated to be video-game like, and I was presented the opportunity to develop the aesthetic and bring it to life.
I was the lead developer on this project and managed to weave it’s requirements around my regular work, as it was done under a freelance contract.
Aside from being done at a distance (having never met the rest of the team in real life) a few noteworthy points about this project come to mind as I reflect.
One of the requirements for the game was to build an internal media player which could play audio and video files. I’ve never worked with SFX in such detail before so I was compelled to dig into the functionality of the Unity audio system. Aspects like fading from one track to another, keeping music playing between scenes and exposing balancing properties to the user to name a few. This was both refreshing and enlightening - and definitely useful to take forward into future projects. As for the video clips, I ended up leveraging render textures in a custom video player script. These were wrapped up inside their own UI based video player.
Another interesting aspect of the development process was the recognition of the limited technical understanding of the designer towards the Unity engine. I had to make sure that almost every factor of the game was encapsulated as it’s own prefab. Ideally resulting in pieces of the game ready to be dropped into a scene and arranged as seen fit. They all had to work with each other and require only the most obvious settings to be input on scripts, minimalizing explanation and bugs. Simply put, I made the bricks and the designer build the structure. I’m not normally used to working with such defined roles as this, so it was an interesting twist to the flow of things.
Here is a gif of the game mid development showcasing the outfits you could use.
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