Hela

Hela is the first 'real' game I created. I had, of course, made games previously, but they were either not in a proper game engine, or I was just following simple tutorials to create the same as someone else. Hela is a simple 5 level game with a boss fight at the end, which was completed sometime during the covid lockdowns in 2020. The player has a first-person view of a character who can summon and throw swords to defeat enemies. The aim of the game is to just make it to the end door of each level with a new monster, with various abilities and attributes, being on each of the 5 levels.

This goes allllll the way back to primary school; we used to have 1 hour a week focussed on computer skills. Naturally, we have scratch, how to use the file explorer, etc. But my most favourite topic we covered was Kodu Game Lab. For those unaware, it's a game engine of sorts that uses blocks to create game logic, similar to scratch! I remember going home, making new games in it, and bringing them in on a USB to show my teacher. Looking back, I feel very lucky to have had a computer class this early, especially on this topic which really fostered my passion. Moving on to high school the next instance of me dipping my toe into game creation was simply playing around in unity for the first time following tutorials from the legendary Asbjørn 'Brackeys' Thirslund, this set me up to make my final year project for my A-level Computer Science qualification, an evolution simulator in unity (The files have unfortunately been lost). All of this leads us to this project, the first real game!

I believe the games name comes from the main antagonist of the 'Thor: Ragnarok' Film, as cringey as that is. Hela is a god who can summon and throw swords, so the name is a bit on the nose. There is no real story to the game visible to the user, but the idea was that a town was taken over by a dark wizard, who features as the final boss. This project was quite difficult, as I had no modelling experience, finding and fitting random assets from the Unity Asset Store was time consuming and frustrating, leading to a lot of compromises in the final build. I also had no individual C# experience, only python at the time. However, I LOVE learning new technologies, and excel at rapid progression, making this project ideal to garnering motivation in me.

As you can tell from the screenshots, the game is very obviously unpolished but considering I had not made anything like it before, I am proud of it. Since the completion of the game, I have made more projects in unity, which you can see on the other projects featured on this website, as of the time of writing this, I'm currently working on learning blender so that I can make my own assets may be homogenous. I have however switched my focus to Godot for personal projects after the Unity pricing controversy of 2023.