Studio 1 – Weekly Progress – Week 12 HH

By Harry Hughes

I waited to make this post until the game was fully finished. In the video above I say most of the things I want to say here, but I’ll write some of them out. Ok, perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself saying the game is “fully finished”, but early last week I got the core elements - the missions and the mission texts and the different actions triggering different Unity Scenes – all working together, and felt pretty good once this was done, and then added a few of the superficial elements that made it feel complete.

I simplified the story: you now begin the game and are told to run to the valley town. Along the way you encounter various people who hopefully give you the idea that the Americans are no good, and that there are some mysterious caves somewhere. You then run back up to the town where the organizer asks you to look for their keys, which are near the “Admiral’s House”. If you go looking for those keys, you’ll be in trouble because they don’t exist, but in the town you will encounter some more people, this time Americans, who tell you essentially that they don’t really like the Australians, and again remind you about the caves. When the timer runs down, a “game over” style screen appears, which encourages you to “Look beyond”. What you really need to do is run to the caves, meet the Australian person there who tells you about the secret plan to burn down the valley’s houses while everyone is up at the festival. You jump in their car and are teleported to the valley, where you are told to push a log in front of a truck to stop the truck from burning the houses down. Doing this will win you the game.

Once I got all that flowing, I added the many finishing touches the game needed. I made cut-scenes (in the jankiest way possible- I animated a camera and then screen recorded the animation with an external recorder). I adjusted the countdown timer to look a bit better. I added in all the people, wrote their dialogue, and recorded most of the dialogue with an online voice-to-text program. I added all the festival assets. I made and added signs. You know, finishing touches.

Maxine, a Studio 1 buddy, suggested I alter the “game over” screen. The version I showed in the presentation said “game over you didn’t save the town”. Maxine suggested I say something like “you only explored 20%”. I didn’t say exactly that, but that was indeed a useful suggestion so that people wouldn’t feel the game had glitched out on them, and so I’ve now changed it to “You didn’t save the town, look beyond”. I also got some very supportive feedback during the presentation which made me feel pretty good about the path I was on.

Before the MAGI expo where I plan to show this project, I would really love to get some more feedback from players. Especially now that I can upload and share it I think this shouldn’t be too difficult. I’m fairly confident I’ve made all the little additions I can think of, and I’m ready to move on to something new.

Thanks for a great semester.