Post-Mortem for my GameDev.tv 2023 Game Jam submission, “Pitch”.
Project Overview
Game Title: Pitch
Game Blurb:
In the post-apocalyptic world of “Pitch,” Earth collides with a vast and mysterious dimension, thrusting humanity into a desperate struggle for survival. Forced underground into treacherous caves, survivors must navigate a haunting and desolate landscape. The collision of dimensions has spawned mutated creatures that roam the darkness, driven away by light.
With only their flashlights as protection, players must carefully manage their battery power while scouring the depths for valuable crystal fragments, remnants of shattered dimensional clusters. These fragments serve as a vital currency for trading with Althizir, an enigmatic NPC who supplies essential flashlight batteries.
“Pitch” presents a challenging and immersive experience, inviting players to uncover the secrets of the shattered dimensions and confront the terrifying mutants that lurk in the shadows. It’s a harrowing journey through a broken world, where resourcefulness and courage are paramount in the pursuit of survival.
Link: https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2023/rate/2088906
Project Goals
Original Goals:
• Build a simple yet compelling survival game loop, where the player collects gems in a dark environment to sell to Althizir in exchange for batteries, critical for maintaining flashlight power.
• Create an immersive, procedurally generated cave environment that feels dangerous and mysterious, with resourceful exploration at its core.
• Ensure that flashlight battery management is a key aspect of survival, forcing players to balance exploration and resource conservation.
• Implement a single NPC, Althizir, who serves as a key figure in the game’s economy, trading batteries for gems and fostering repeat player interactions.
• Design an approachable survival game that encourages strategic planning but does not overwhelm players with overly complex mechanics.
Changes to the Goals:
• Due to time constraints, the goal of adding healing items (e.g., bandages) was not realized, and the narrative intended for Althizir was somewhat diminished due to technical issues with the user interface.
• Although the core loop of gem collection and battery management was successful, there were difficulties in making flashlight controls intuitive.
What went right?
• Procedural Cave Generation using Blender was fun and easy. Definitely would like to work more with it to create more complex cave systems. I used vertices to map out the cave structure, then the skin modifier, subsurface to give more vertices to play with, displace with a noise texture, and finally remeshed and decimated to make it game ready.
• Enemy AI seemed to be well recieved and fun to test. It was my first test with more complex AI, my last behavior tree was just moving towards the player when within a certain distance. This one had a leap attack, roaming, and cowering behaviors. The leap attack initally was way over scaled and had a hitbox issue, but was fixed right before pushing it to the game jam.
• Food and Crystal generation was fun for me to work with and fun for players that I tested in person with. The variety and descriptions of items seemed to be fun for players. And having an area that regenerated food and water made it so that players would revisit AL, even if they weren’t interacting with him. Creating a “safe-zone”, which was my intention.
• Items were not very visible on screen and the item tag system fixed that very well. Checking if there are any items visible on the camera with a certain tag and then finding the item name and creating a text on the screen space canvas made it so there were no scaling issues and the items on the ground were visible to players. It was also feeling very reminiscent of old RPG PC games like Dungeon Siege and Neverwinter Nights.
What went wrong?
• The flashlight controls were not well explained and hard to use with the camera perspective. To remedy this, I would make more heavy constraints on the flashlight max and min height and make the map more flat.
• Cursor lock state got messed up on launch for game jam. Making functions that handle this may help in the future to make sure it is called when clickable UI is toggled.
• Pressing ‘e’ to interact was not clear to some users. Making a more screen present pop-up initially would be helpful.
• I was trying to get in a bandage item to the game, but with the way I had initially set up the item data structures it was having issues with displaying and being used in the inventory GUI.
• The game loop wasn’t well explained and people ended up doing it by accident. But since the NPC interaction sometimes messed with the mouse visibility, people weren’t able to interact much with the narrative.
Tools Used:
I used Unity 3D version 2021.3.16f1, Blender, and Adobe Substance Painter for this project.
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