Beyond This Life
Team Size: 3
Game Engine: Unity
Role(s): Programmer, UI Artist
Your name is Clementine Mairead, a babysitter turned detective following the cold case of your brother's murder. Now, sometime later, you end up dead as well. Who killed you? Does it involve your past? You might be a ghost, but you still have a duty to fulfill.
Key Contributions
-
Created a designer friendly custom visual novel system with auto-reading, text skipping, sprite display, still display, and history log functions to emulate the Japanese visual novel style found in other game engines like Ren'Py.
-
Added a point-and-click system for environmental interaction and a point-and-drag system for player movement across the 2.5D world.
-
Designed a tooltip-equipped inventory system to give players item information and a draggable item system to use inventory items in the game world for puzzles.
Game Features
When working on this project, I blended visual novel and point-and-click elements together to create a unique and immersive experience with puzzles and story. Unlike traditional point-and-click games, players are free to move around the game world with ease by holding and dragging the mouse left and right. Players can interact with various items that either trigger dialogue or add items to their inventory for later use. The inventory system is made more interactive with the use of tooltips, providing useful information about items, and the ability to drag items out of the inventory and use them on items in the game world. To enhance the visual novel aspects of the game, I incorporated functions inspired by traditional Japanese visual novels, including text fast-forwarding, automatic text reading, and a history log for easy reference. I also added a name box for spoken dialogue, character sprites, and full image stills for cutscenes.
Issues and Challenges
One challenge I faced during this project was being the sole member with programming experience, while the rest of the team consisted of designers. To address this, I adopted an approach that focused on creating tools to facilitate the designers' work on the project. This is where the visual novel system came into play. I designed a system that allowed designers to easily input dialogue text, drag and drop sprites into the inspector, and add cutscene objects to elements that required them. They could even input commands within the dialogue text to change the text's color, streamlining the content creation process.
Another challenge faced was transitioning from a 2D to a 2.5D format. Initially, all aspects of the game operated within a 2D space, but feedback highlighted that our game's perspective appeared somewhat off with the floor being flat. To rectify this, we opted to structure the levels in a manner similar to a pop-up book, using planes for both the floor and walls. This approach allowed us to place objects in a 3D space, resulting in a significant improvement in the game's visual perspective. Additionally, this transition led to changes in the player controls to ensure smooth navigation within the bounds of the 3D space as a 2D character such as having 3D colliders and adding world bounds. These efforts resulted in a game that not only looked but also felt vastly improved compared to its previous state.
Reflections
This project was rewarding to work on and I am incredibly happy with how it came out. Although the programming aspect was challenging, it was thoroughly tested for bugs. As I had minimal involvement in the character and background art, I spent a lot of time documenting and optimizing the code. While originally exclusively 2D, a last-minute change based on feedback had us switch to a 2.5D format, where 2D sprites were placed in a 3D environment, which turned out to be an excellent decision. Clementine Mairead, my original character, was seamlessly integrated into the game world with minor adjustments. I received positive feedback from my peers, and I am glad at how it came out myself.