PROJECT NAME / ROLE: Hand Against Time(HAT)
PROJECT SUMMARY: An exploration in technical, narrative, and generalist design shown primarily in integrated tutorials, cutscenes, and physics based powers.
DESIGN CONTRIBUTIONS: Solo Developed and using free CC0 assets
EXPLANATION:
A Hand Against Time is a project I developed to explore new game design and implementation skills, focusing on details to improve immersion and player experience. Technically, the game shows off many systems, like AI behavior, an integrated tutorial, working with and integrating CC0 premade assets, skippable cutscenes, and post-processing and lighting effects. The puzzles and combat are primarily telekinetic interactions, as the movement mechanics stress control of a disembodied hand which is extremely limiting. The gameplay incorporates the full tutorial, and players can either smoothly experience the entire story or skip certain parts. Visual polish from lighting, in addition to effects, improves the game’s eerie atmosphere.
• I tried to focus on impactful and truly small effects, such as splash VFX appearing when objects fall into water, and contribute to a more responsive and immersive world.
• The ragdoll system lets enemies be grabbed by particular limbs. Players can also fling enemies using those limbs into other enemies to really drive the home the feeling of a power fantasy, which is the basis of this game.
TAKE AWAYS:
I learned a number of take aways from this project. I learned about easy ways to engage players looking for a power trip fantasy. By testing with friends self-identified as power trip/destruction gamers, it made it easier to rapidly prototype and find the fun using enemy ragdolling, satisfyingly and easy tutorial ai, and killing enemies using the bodies of their dead.
• I learned how to use post processing and lighting to cover up mismatching styles between assets(see more here). A lot of the assets from one asset pack had a blue tint that was baked into the textures. I could have gone through the painful process of creating a shader to separate and remove some blue or gone through texture by texture removing it with RGB curves. But with not that much time on my hands, I decided to add in blue where those assets were concentrated in the cave. It also gave off a moody slow paced feeling which matched the action, music, and action for this section. When exiting the cave the post processing lightens and uses greens and yellows to give off a toxic and dangerous sense to the player. Allowing a smooth transition to section of the tutorial that introduces combat and environmental hazards.
• And how to use optionally skippable cutscenes to direct and inform the player of the controls for the game(see more here). Having the ability to skip cutscenes to the next text block felt really good to players and was a detail that felt really worthwhile. Usually I would have skips just skip the entire cutscene but having it go to the next text block allows for players who are interested in what it’s saying but read faster than others can skip forward.
• The telekinesis ability completely broke after adding ragdolls and I had considered scrapping the ability to use enemy ragdolls as weapons. But after getting some basic functionality for moving the ragdoll around as an exploration. It seemed like the fun was really high being able to use enemies as weapons. And I would like to further develop this mechanic by adding limbs being severed if stretched too far from it’s parent game object.
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