APD Week01 - Play and Observation

Theme

Play and Obervation 

Context

Portal2 (also Portal) (developed and published by Valve, 2011) is a first person puzzle shooter which uses a strong portal mechanic in its gameplay. Instead of taking straight the idea of being able to use a portal to teleport yourself, but I prefered adding some transformation after using the portal; and using the portal for more a transportation mechanic rather than a puzzle-solving mechanic.

In Yonder : The Cloud Catcher Chronicles (developed and published by Prideful Sloth, 2017), there is a portal room where sage statues behave as portals, which can open once a riddle is solved. Each portal is used as a transportation shortcut, and is modeled based on what the environment looks like on its other side (ie, snow, fall, beach, etc). My main use of this idea was to display what should be expected when crossing the portal, in term of effects.

Dofus (developed and published by Ankama Games, 2003-ongoing) is a turn-based MMORPG. In one of the worlds called Xelorium, you are able to travel from past to present and present to future. I liked that idea of seeing how an environment changes but still has bits and pieces matching other dimensions.

Of course, one main reference is Minecraft (developed and published by Mojang, 2011), a sandbox adventure game which contains iconic portals, helping the player to go from dimension to dimension.

Finally, Antichamber (developed and published by (Demruth) Alexander Bruce, 2013) is a first-person puzzle game where the world changes based on your current observation. Quite a few puzzles involve teleporting based on where you look; and while I wasn't able to quickly prototype such as smooth transition, it is one of my main references for any shader-related works.

Method

I want to create a small mechanic where players can walk through portals within a contained space, and each portal shows the same environment differently.

Response

Attached is a video of the gameplay of a small game prototype where the player is able to walk through portals affecting the way the player view things.
Each of the portal contains several post-processing effects, and based on which portal the player goes through, those are added or removed from the camera.

I wasn't really able to quickly prototype a smooth transition like in Antichamber (within alocated time), although that would be the "end goal" for this mechanic.

At its current state, this project is a simple exploration of a portal-based exploration of worlds.

I couldn't help but struggle to answer this topic without looking back at my CPS projects, since the themes are the same and I had made "play" experiments in CPS classes as well.

Asset Used:
- Unity 2018 LTS
- Unity Standard Assets (first person controller)
- ColorfulFX (post-processing effects)
- Odin Inspectors (pretty inspectors)
- ProBuilder (in-engine simple modeling)

No body allowed!