Employee No. 43

Game genre: First person puzzle solving.

Gameplay summary: Appease your boss and follow all their demands, explore, solve whacky puzzles, uncover the truth!​

Engine: Unity.

Time spent on project: Jul 2017 - May 2018 (8 months)

My job role(s): All. I developed this game solo.

Software used: Unity. MAYA. Substance Painter. Photoshop. Playmaker. Audacity.

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Project details:

Employee No. 43 was my very first significant game project, it was made during my first studies with AIE in a Cert III in Game Design in 2017. I still impress myself on how much I accomplished in this project given it was my very first.

I took obvious inspiration from many games popular at the time, such as The Stanley Parable, Portal, and others. I of course added my own spin to things and went crazy making my own whacky world of puzzles and weird characters and situations.

I learned so much during this project and it cemented my love for creating games! Game design, 3D modelling, Texturing, Level, story and character design. I even did my very first programming using Playmaker when the basic scripts given in our class didn't fit my needs.

I had a great time on this project and even to date it's one of my favourite and most polished projects. Parts of this project also tend to pop up in later projects I did as easter eggs, some small, some big :D 

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My contributions to this project:

• Game design.
  - I remember we had a strict limitation, design a game inside a single A4 size grid map, a good rule to keep our scope in check. 
  - But even then I bent the rules a little and expanded my world even larger when I proved I was managing my scope appropriately.
  - I designed everything in the game, the office space, the warehouse, the secret areas, the story, the characters, even threw in an easter egg trophy cabinet before class ended.
  
  

• Art.
  - I made all the 3D assets seen in the game. All the particle FX. Lighting.
  - The custom artwork such as the variety of posters, logos and other unique art in game I made myself.
  - Regular textures I sourced from various free websites, but one in particular I used a personal photo of a carpet I took at bunnings lol
  
  

• Programming.
  - Towards the end of the Cert III as I got more experienced in designing levels and mechanics I needed more than the provided scripts could offer, so I ended up learning to use Playmaker (a state machine visual scripting tool) to solve some other more specific coding tasks. 
  - I used Playmaker to make a Pickup & Inspect script (because the teachers script was buggy! lol), moving platform w/ parenting the player to each platform scripts, manipulating time and gravity scripts, player push/pull objects, player crouch, and more.
  - I remember I wasn't familiar enough to use raycasting back then, so I cheated by using a long skinny invisible box collider attached to the players head to act as the raycast lol, worked well enough for the pickup script, but overlapping several objects obv was an issue, but just shows I would find a way to make things work even with limited knowledge of scripting.
  
  

• Audio.
  - I wanted to add something more than plain old text dialogue to the game, so since the boss is a robot, - I added robotic voice dialogue whenever they speak to you (w/ subtitles). I did this by using a text to speech converter, and modified it in Audacity to sound more robotic.
  - The rest was general sourcing of free SFX for all other audio in game, with some modifications here & there.

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Highlights from this project:

• My very first start to finish proper game. All the steps of level design, puzzle design, gameplay balancing, iteration changes, narrative design and writing/implementing voiced dialogue.

• First time creating modular kits for fast level building.

• First game I added easter eggs & collectables.

• First successes at programming things myself.