They Were Doomed from the Beginning
Why
The project was made for a Second Year UNI assignment which involved groups of developers from separate streams working together to create a functional product while working in a way that replicates some of the real-world. Teams would have to come up with an Elevator pitch for the game and basically a rudimentary GDD that would include details about the product/project and the teachers from the streams involved (Programmers, Artists and Designers) would critique the pitched details.
After getting feedback on the pitched project, teams may need to refactor ideas, or if teachers thought there wasn't enough information or that the team might not work together, the project may be scrapped and developers would have to join another team. Thankfully this project made it past all the interviews with little additional work, however, we were the smallest team which was one of our largest risks moving forward.
What
They Were Doomed From The Beginning is an Interactive story with RPG elements, ever changing narrative mechanics and narrative combat. The start of the game pans from a door in a atmospheric environment towards a book on a table, the player is greeted by the main menu.
When starting a new game players will draw cards from a Tarot Deck, which will determine their party of characters, the weapons and magic they wield, some of their past, the adventures they’ll have and... their ultimate fate.
Start_Screen
The starting scene for the game.
Ch1_Fool_Start
Starting Chapter for the Fool Tarot card.
First_Event
The first interactive event a player can run into.
Main_Menu
A simple main menu for the game.
Select_A_Character
The player can choose from a selection of cards.
Select_3_Minor
After choosing a Major arcana, the player can choose to select one Minor from a selection of three.
Select_From_3_Minor
Select one from the three cards.
Characters
We followed some similar trends from traditional tarot reading, but with some fantasy rpg type themes weaved into them. If you're interested, I'd recommend searching for what card Symbology can represent. While not always a direct comparison, there are often similarities between the game and the traditional meanings.
Fool
Card Description: An exuberant entertainer with a good heart and an attraction to mischief, he cherishes the audience that adores him.
Concept: A good hearted young man. With a chaotic but well meaning streak. He could be a kind and relatively normal person till he puts on his "performance gear", in which his method acting has chaotic consequences…
Features:
- Has the most personality
- Looks and behaves to his namesake.
- Has a lighthearted personality and approach to situations
The Pitch
As part of the selection process to be allowed to move onto the next stage of work a short pitch-video had to be made for the project. This was to be done before much or if at all, any of the project had been started. I spent some time making very crude proof of concept assets for the video, I don't have any vocals in the video, but created all of the unity assets used within the examples.
Ticker System
The game follows a fairly simple story which all of our characters followed, however, their actions throughout gameplay could result in changes in the world, both in terms to the final outcome at the final scene, but also in how the story evolved using branching and dynamic elements. These were done using a "Ticker" system, a system that could ask questions about details that were chosen to be stored during events and moments when the story has been written/populated and do a variety of things depending on the result of the response.
Any time the game loaded the next chunk of the story, an event fired or even in a ticker response the ticker system could be modified and store or remove new data from its module. The main functions it could do was to save a key that would be looked up later for story evolution, but it could also add, multiply and do some simple lookup tables and if-condition like expressions. An example of this is the Fool who can choose to save a dog during the game, later on the story reflects and uses that dog as part of the story, even if they didn't bring the dog, the story is able to remember the choice and show relevant updates.
The World
While the game was made short so that we could scope out enough detail that the story would remain interesting, there was a fair bit of lore around the game. We sadly did not have the time to flesh out a lot of the smaller details around the events in the game, but we still tried to create interesting and diverse characters and creatures for the game. With only the one fulltime artist assets were hard to make, and as such were a more limiting factor if the characters wern't to be interacted with and just another element of the story, they often had to be put on the "maybe one day" list. However, a few nice animations were made for the game, some of which can be found below.
Downloads
Several documents were made throughout the development of this project as it was a UNI course, I've provided some of the more interesting documents and the build that was submitted for assessment.
Assessed Build: Download 260mb
Post Mortem: Download
Technical Design Doc: Download
Game Design Doc: Download