An image from the levels deck where the player start off on.
The Lost Vessel
About the Game
This project was an eight week long group project where we had to make a prototype game. The team had 5 coders/developers and 4 artist from Helsinki Vocational College and Adult Institute. Both sides had a to-do list of what to do and how important it is to have in the game. Both ends did an amazing job towards the game and the outcome was what we wanted.
I decided to venture into slightly not so familiar tasks, so I started with level designing and dialogue. Both came out well and as planned. I also did the games objectives, by their scripts and interactable limits. We encountered many bugs and managed to fix them accordingly with the addition of having more appear.
After finishing the game we decided to make it public to get more feedback from people outside our class. We were not epecting to get the amount we got. It was widely positive with a few understandable negatives. We managed got get a massive amount of views and plays which I specifically did not expect from our prototype.
The game can be found here.
In the Game
The 1st floor with the games enemy.
The ships break room.
The trailer for our game, made by myself.
Details
Here, I have listed the technical details of the game, covering aspects such as graphics and the bugs we encountered along the way.
Graphics 🎨
We started with chatting about what the game would look like, we ended up with the classic PSX low-poly style. It improved the horror element perfectly and we managed to get a working shader for the game and it makes it look old as planned.
Mechanics ⚙️
We went with the basic first person view with basic movement. The game has no major difference from others apart from our door mechanics, we used a mouse pull system to close and open doors.
The doors were slightly a hassle to perfect but in the end we got a working version.
We used a simple inventory for the pickups without a seperate UI for it, we wanted to minimize pickups and make it focus on the story and the investigating.
As I was in a major part for the dialogue, it wasn't a difficult task. There were some difficulty with linking and timing the text.
My favourite part in this was the story and finding ways to connect how the player would react and interact.
During the whole planning phase and later on in the building phase we had many chats about what the player would do and how, it was a long task to finalize the story
Problems ❌
While coding and throwing ideas, we encountered multiple problems with either coding of GitHub.
In coding we encountered a dozen of problems that widen from linking problems to errors we don't know why they appear. We always found a solution to fix the majority of errors, some being a cheap fix and end of conversation.
We tried to minimize these fixes as it may cause larger problems along the way.
We also encountered an annoying amount of trouble with GitHub and merging branches. As a 5 coder team in a group GitHub we rarely got a perfect merge or push as we all had different scenes in Unity and some codes being different.
We encountered multiple conflicts which we also managed to handle, and we do not miss them at all after finishing this project.
List of some bugs/problems
- GitHub merge conflicts
- Enemy AI pathing
- Text overlapping or getting stuck
Improvements 🛠️
After finishing the project and seeing feedback from players, I would change some features especially with the text to make it more interactive and responsive. I would also talk with the team about their thought on changes or updates to insure it's still a group project.
Progress ⌛
With previously mentioning this was a 9 person team, 5 coders and 4 artists. We had a lot to do to insure everyone had something to do and prevent anyone feeling left out. The progress of our game has been mainly uphill with some few bumps along the road.