Meet Our Team:
Sigma Males
My Role: Programmer / Engine engineer / Game Designer
Taking charge of setting up / maintaining our game project file as well as implementing all the ideas / functions / art assets into the game.
My Teammates:
Aaliyah Tran-Tayag - Puzzle Design / Documentation / Game Designer
Timothy Yang - Puzzle Design / Documentation / SFX / Game Designer
Ruizhi Tu - Map Design / Game Designer
Haoyu Liu - 2D Artist / Game Designer
Junhe Chen - UI Artist / Game Designer
Setting & Story
Genre & Experience:
A Pixel Horror Puzzle game in the 2.5D perspective. Players are able to explore the game world with a 3D character controller and interact with certain items they found in the world. An Escape-Room-like experience will be delivered to the player as players have to find out clues and evidence in the game world, analyze them and connect them together in a logical way in order to make progress in the game. Inspired by games such as Silent Hill and OutLast, the game also prive players with a monster system which has no way to defeat them but running away and hiding.
Image below: Team brainstorming the game Idea
The Story
A detective visiting a school as an unlikely job. What is first a simple
infestation turns into something far more sinister as the paranormal begins to unveil itself. The detective will quickly find themselves coming face to face with a monster. With the new task of banishing the beast, the Detective must explore through the school searching for clues on how
to send an unkillable devil back to where it once came.
The Game Loop
1. EXPLORE
Players will be able to traverse the school grounds.
2. DISCOVER & SOLVE
Alternating perspectives in order to solve puzzles and navigate through the levels
3. HIDE
Surviving the beast means finding a way to break it’s sight. You can’t fight back so this is the next best thing.
My Contributions To the Team
The 2.5D Character Controller
There are Two Big Challenges when creating a 2.5D controller for the game:
1. The Default Unity3D Shader does not support the 2D sprite. Which means when implementing our 2D sprite into a 3D unity project, all the light effects do not work on our 2D character. So a lot of time was spent on researching and creating a customized shader for our project so that all the fancy lights and shadows can be applied on our 2D sprites for the game
2. The traditional 3D character controller does not apply to the 2d sprite. The main reason is that for a 2d sprite, if players look at it from the side view, there is nothing they can see but a straight line. So the traditional way to make a 3d character left and right does not work for us. To fix this, I made a customized 2.5D controller that allows the sprite to rotate with the camera angle, so the player can only see either the front side of the sprite or the back side of the sprite.
The Inventory System
The Inventory System is the core system behind the scene: it connects all the other systems in game together to create a functional puzzle experience.
The Logic
Both the player inventory and the collectable items are created as Scriptable Objects in the game. The inventory player has is a dictionary that holds all the collectable prefabs. When players collect certain items in game, the actual game objects will be destroyed and the scriptable object that it represents will be added into the inventory dictionary
Connection with other System
1. When player interact with item that requires a key: The system will go through all the item player has inside the dictionary, if player has it, then the 'door' will be unlocked.
2. When player interact with puzzle that triggers a event. The system will check if player has certain item in the dictionary, if so, system will trigger the event associated with it, which is also stored inside the slot of the dictionary
The Interaction System
When Player approaches an collectable item or items that require a key (door / collectable item), an world canvas will pop up, giving the player a hint that they can now interact with the item.
For items that player is able to check the detail (chalk board) or interact with (the locker). Player movement will be locked and the sub cam will be enabled which helps the player to have a better view.
The Monster AI
I use Node Canvas in Unity to build our monster AI. The design of the AI follows the FSM concept:
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Monster Idle at its spawn location as default state
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When the player gets close enough to the monster under any state, the monster starts chasing the player
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When the player hides inside the locker, the monster stops chasing and starts searching the player for 5s.
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If the player found, keep chasing, if not, give up and start patrolling around the game map
My TakeAway From the Project
As a programmer, all the systems in our game valuses a lot to me and I believe they can not only be used in this project but also can be applied to other future projects as well. Having experience building these sytems helps me better prepared on designing the new system for the future projects as well. Mechanics and systems in game are never seperate by themselves. They interact a lot with each other in many ways. So a clean and smart design of the systen as a whole do contribute to not only the performance of the game but also the mental health of the programmer team.
As a game designer, I believe all the new things and skills I learned from this project can be applied to my future game develpment. For example, using team management tools such as Jira to keep track of the team progress; Having a team charter written before the actual work start so when conflict arises we can always look back to what we agreed on initially. Also, the SPRINT itself is a super powerful tool for prototyping ideas in a short period of time which I will for sure use in any project I will have later on.
Lastly, I believe how to behave as a nice human being with sympathy and respect and how to get along with teammates under pressure is a strong soft skill that requires me to keep learning for the rest of my life.
