The Lena Project
A horror and science fiction game in Unity, made by a team of six. The characters and the story are settled, the environments are in greybox, and the engineering discipline around the repositories is deliberate.
- When
- In development
- Team
- Six people
- Engine
- Unity, C#
- Assets
- Blender, Tripo AI
The game
Horror and science fiction, built in Unity. The narrative and the cast are established rather than still being argued about, which for a team project is most of the battle. Dr. Mara Voss, Lena and the Guardians carry the story.
The asset pipeline
Blender does the modelling work and Tripo AI is in the pipeline for generating first-pass geometry that then gets cleaned up rather than shipped as-is. Environments are blocked out in greybox with ProBuilder, so level layout can be played and judged before anyone spends a week making a corridor look good.
How we work
The repositories live under a GitHub organization rather than a personal account, and the branching rules are written down instead of assumed. Six people touching one Unity project is exactly the situation where an unwritten convention becomes a merge conflict nobody can untangle.
- Trunk-based development, with
mainas the single source of truth. - Short-lived branches, one per feature or fix, cut from
main. - A pull request is required for any change to
main. - Merges happen by rebase or squash, never with a merge commit.
- Bringing
maininto a branch is done by rebase rather than by merge.
The reason for the last two is a readable history. A linear log is something you can bisect and reason about months later, and on a project with binary assets that is not a luxury.
What I took from it
- On a team of six, the process is not overhead, it is the thing that stops the work colliding.
- Greybox first is the level design equivalent of writing the test before the code.
- Generated assets are a starting point, not an output. The cleanup is where the quality comes from.