Heart of Hampstead (2022)

Made in Unity
Team Size: 2
Timeline: 4-5 months
Worked On: Game Design, Game Narrative, Game Programming, etc.

As a Designer

This project was for my undergrad capstone class. I designed and planned out the project myself, and got the opportunity to work with an amazing artist that wanted to work on a game for their own capstone project.
As the lead on the project, I designed the short narrative behind the game, as well as many other aspects including a beliefs system that the player uses at the end of each day, the narrative and character dialogue, and part of the level design.
This was my first complete experience game that I had made, and it is a little rough in some areas, but I am proud of the work the two of us did. Currently, I am making plans to rework this game in Unreal in my free time. I have a lot of notes on what I want to rework/do better. This partly includes reworking the narrative, adding in an intro/tutorial level, adding in more interactions, among other things. I don't have a plan yet on when this will be done as it's secondary to my schoolwork and job.

As a Programmer

Since this was a two-person project I did all the programming on the game. This was my Capstone project for my Computer Science degree, so programming was a big part for me. I made the movement system, the dialogue system, the beliefs system, etc. It was a lot of fun for me to do this, and I am proud of what it is.
The biggest hurdle I had was creating the beliefs system. At the end of each day, the player can pick what they believed and didn't believe from the notes they found. When designing it, I had come up with different ways to do this. An easy way would to make them into a check-list, but I wanted the player to have a bit more agency than that. This is when I came up with the idea of dragging the statements into two columns.
After deciding how it would work, I had to program it. The idea of it was fairly simple, drag the statements to one side of the screen or the other, but it caused a lot of issues for me. One issue was that it didn't seem to cover the entire area I was expecting it to, so statements would be dragged but not actually in the area they needed to be. I fixed this issue by tweaking the values, as well as making the area a little larger than I thought it should be - but this also allows for mistakes where the player didn't fully drag it over.