Puzzles

To offer a more varied gameplay experience, we decided to include puzzles into the game. I created an interactable tablet that brings the player into a 2d minigame where they have to connect the power source to the locked door using wires.  Looking back on the construction of this puzzle type I believe it would have felt more professional if the wires smoothly animated when they rotated instead of automatically snapping 90 degrees. I do however stand by the functionality of the minigame, even if I don’t feel the same way about its visual presentation. 

One of these puzzles exist in the main level, and two more are in the boss level. I feel I was able to make them varied enough from each other given the limitations of the grid I had to work within. 

Echo Lure

One of the player’s mutation abilities was pitched as a throwable object that emitted sound in order to distract enemies. I volunteered to work on this ability because I haven’t worked much with sound and noise events in Unreal Engine and saw this as an opportunity to learn how those systems intertwined with AI perception. I regret that we weren’t able to add in an animation for the player throwing the lure itself. It was on the list for polishing the game, but bug fixing in other areas held a higher priority, and eventually there just wasn’t really time to do it.   

Healing System

We realized early on that the player’s health drained very quickly, showing the need for a way to regain some of the lost health. I decided it would make sense for the drone that follows the player to hold a stimpack that could be used to heal. I implemented a regenerating pool of points that the player could trigger with a button at any point, making the drone zoom over to them and deposit the points into their depleted health bar. After some experimenting with the rate of regeneration, I settled on a large percentage that would fill up at long intervals. I wanted to give the player the feeling of desperately waiting for the drone to heal them followed by the relief when they jump from nearly dead to half health. It creates a greater sense of care in the player that would be lacking if they could continuously regain small doses of health at shorter intervals. 

Biolocked Doors

As a way to gate player progression, I made a door that could only be unlocked if the player had a certain amount of mutation. This would ensure that they would not enter the area in question with finding and using some of the mutation abilities and getting more familiar with how the game worked. The doors unlocked by the puzzles served a different purpose, being more a way to vary the gameplay than gate progression. 

We also made the biolock door damage the player upon opening, putting them in a vulnerable state as they enter the enemy-riddled area on the other side. 

Mutation Cores

For the final level, we didn’t want a traditional boss battle as it felt incongruous to the rest of the gameplay. Instead, I suggested using Portal as a point of inspiration, seeing as how that game was able to have a final boss that didn’t rely on combat. The design team took that and applied it to our story, leading to the conception of the final level as it exists in the game. The player has to find and destroy three mutation cores, after which a bridge will be opened for them to cross to the heart of the mutation infecting the entire space station. 

I worked with the art team on what the mutation cores should look like, and we ended up with orange eyes that explode into piles of goo once you destroy them. I hooked these independent actors up to the level save state and made them properly trigger the bridge appearing once all three had been destroyed. 

Bone Blade and Shotgun

While the original functionality of the player’s weapons was done by another member of the coding team, a family emergency occurred and they had to leave the project for a while. I stepped in and added more organic button inputs for triggering the weapons, as well as an over-the-shoulder aiming mode for the shotgun. After some debate with the design team, we changed the mutation levels at which the player unlocked the weapons to hopefully make for a better experience.

Looking back on the project, I feel as though these two weapons don’t really add to the overall experience of the game. You can kill an enemy, but the weapon you used likely sapped a portion of your health away. In almost all cases just running and hiding from the enemies is a safer route to take than fighting. 

Miscellaneous Contributions

There were other small things I worked on such as the pause menu, the options menu, the main menu, the save system, the unlocking of the icons that represent each ability, a weird amount of collision issues, a widget that would tell you if you didn’t have enough mutation for the biolocked door, and the objects that unlock the players mutation abilities.

Overall Thoughts on the Project

I appreciate our professor Brian Foster for structuring this class in this way. It helped so much to experience being a part of a development cycle with a decently sized team. Our producer, Annastachia, and our lead programmer, Dameron, did a great job guiding us in the right direction as the project went on. 

I think one of our biggest issues as a team was our communication, or the lack thereof. In the beginning, we didn’t discuss the scope as thoroughly as we should have in a group setting, leading to the design team planning out a much larger amount of gameplay area than the art team could reasonably work with. There were also a few instances of programmers (myself included) accidentally creating merge conflicts on their branches due to working on a blueprint at the same time as someone else. However, I do believe that the nature of a class like this worked to strengthen our communication, and the second half of the semester suffered much fewer instances of these issues. 

Regarding the work that I contributed to this project I feel proud of what I was able to accomplish. Many of the problems I had to solve were new to me, but thanks to my professor and team members I was able to find my way through them. 

I also learned how to be more independent and not rely on my team’s lead to tell me what to do. As the weeks went on, I did a better job of playtesting the game and finding areas of buggy or missing content and finding out how to fill them on my own.