Gameplay Programmer
About the project
You play a kid having to study, but your console is much more tempting. You need to finish three mini-games, to win the game but only problem is that your mom is in the next room and can hear you. So the player has to finish the games fast enough before the mother comes in.
Project Specifics
Team size: 7 people
Project Time: FEB 2024 - JUL 2024
My Roles: Game Programmer, Project Manager
​Tools: Unity, Rider, Notion
First prototype & evaluation
Our interaction system and the behavior of the mother were the first things done. The interaction system was a chance for me to try new things in programming, like abstract classes, inheritance and interfaces because I wanted to improve my skills.
Interaction
The player can interact with the book and the console. The book being a way to introduce games that are then playable in the console to keep a high level of immersion. We kept the interaction realistic and functional to make the game immersive and intuitive.
Lighting
We needed a lot of immersion to get a horror feeling going and a big part of that is the lighting. We used a very dark environment with a really bright lightning, which is cold and white to have a high contrast of color and light that would make the player feel exposed.
Unity Profiler
We had a lot of light sources which was good for immersion and mood, but bad for performance. So light baking was one of the first things we tackled. It was helpful to keep a look at the profiler to see where performance is being drained and fix when needed.
polymorphism
Inheritance & Abstraction
The basics of OOp
Especially abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism helped me develop more programming skills. For me, inheritance was a good way to learn and know how to build flexible systems with little effort and keep the code clean. Though it started off hard to understand, it was easy to keep.
Me
My teamwork
It was new to me working with a team for longer than one semester but because the last time worked that well, we wanted to try again and that was the right choice. I am proud of my team and how we have been growing together for over a year now - here I tried to further improve my management skills, where I gathered feedback from the last time and tried to implement them this time.
conclusion
"Horror needs good time management and even better pacing."
~ me
​
It was really surprising to me how much horror comes with the pacing of the game, when something should happen and how far it should happen away from other events to really steer the attention of the player.