Unity Assignment3

GAME BACKGROUND:

Age: 19

You are in a coma. Your mind feels foggy...

Your body currently resides in the hospital bed. You’ve made an attempt to take your own life but your body is still hanging on. You find yourself in a strange place… You don’t recognize where you are but the surroundings feel familiar. 

Your spirit awakens in limbo. You start wandering around and come upon familiar memories, as well as your inner vices manifested as evil demons wandering deep in your mind. You must go around to collect your memories to consolidate your own soul, before advancing on to the next level while avoiding the evil spirits.

INSTRUCTION:

Stars unlock memories to beat the level. 

Use the arrow keys to navigate, spacebar to jump, shift to shoot. 

Idea Process:

Our inspiration is from the movie related to spirit. In the process, we talk about the platform games' interaction, mechanism.  Our idea is about the spirit looking for memories. In this process, we talk about the character's shape. We found a lot of references. We think that the spirit should not have gender. 

 

A development devlog that includes 3 sections

- The development process overall

Our team aimed to delegate duties equally that allowed us to work remotely while collaborating in the process. We were able to communicate through a group chat where we were able to aid each other in building our game. We each worked on certain aspects in the game that we had divided up in person while updating each other on bugs and issues. It was challenging to get all our levels to sync up and work cohesively but through Unity Collab we were able to coordinate our moving parts successfully.

- Design docs, development images, notes

Goal: Collect Memories 

Ending: Accepting death(Win: wake up; Failure: still sleep)

Enemies: Obsessions/evil spirits 

Shooting: Fighting enemies (fighting yourself) 

Character: cute ghost (of a teenage girl) 

Levels:levels are associated with a type a memory (happy, sad, angry, etc)

Character tutorial (how to play, goals, objectives) 

Each memory is a level

Level 1: Sad memory

Level 2: Scary memory

Level 3: Happy memory 

Story:

You are a spirit wandering the limbo between life and death. 

The girl has depression. 

You have experienced a failed suicide attempt. You must go through 

Sad story - Your dog got lost - turns into acceptance - turns into a happy memory 

Scary memory - You are scared of ghosts but the ghosts ended up being your grandma protecting you 

Happy memory - Mom’s cooking and eating meals with the whole family - makes you feel grateful and happy

Ending - You come back to life, save yourself, you are no longer depressed

- Playtesting feedback

It is hard to find all the stars/knowing how many there are in the scene to pass the level, especially as the levels get harder.

The music really fits the mood and storyline! 

It is a little hard to catch all the dialogue - is the goal to read all the dialogue or get all the stars?

When jumping, it gets a little confusing when getting stuck on walls

It would be more clear if the stars were put near the background objects to create the memory = star association

A postmortem devlog that includes 4 sections

- Successes (What went right)

Our group was able to create a fully functional platformer game with a full game loop, interactive objects, a point/health system, enemies that targeted you, a player that can shoot bullets, and dialogue that were triggered by objects for a more immersive experience. We maintained a consistent aesthetic throughout the entirety of the game. We also were able to collaborate well with meeting outside of class and keeping in communication with each other. 

- Failures (What went wrong)

We had originally planned for the background objects that trigger the dialogue to be also interactive with the player but ran out of time. Additionally, we ran out of time to create more animations for our players and enemy sprites so that they become more lively. We had also tried implementing a health bar + life count system where when you lose all your HP, you lose one life that remained consistent throughout the whole game. Instead, we ended up using a simple HP health bar that reset at the beginning of each level. 

- Lessons Learned (What did you learn from your failures or how did you overcome them)

Things we learned from the making of this game are how to play with lighting in Unity 2D, how to create a character that can shoot and interact with its surroundings, how to create a health bar UI and general level design in a 2D platformer setting. 

We also learned the importance of collaboration and group work in dividing up tasks equally to make a functioning game within our time constraints. 

- Future Development (If you were to continue working on this game how would you improve it)

For the future, we would like to implement a more sophisticated health system that would remain the same throughout the whole game to for a better flow from level to level.  We would also like to create enemies that physically attack you instead of just hovering towards you and more attacks that can be used for the main player. Given more time, we would like for more variations/enemy types that can maybe be relevant and unique to each level. 

For the purpose of the story we are trying to tell with our game, we would also consider creating cutscenes in between levels to show the process of accepting your memories.