Week 1 (Feb 28th - March 6th)

Capstone Concept:

My Capstone project idea is a first person game where players need to pilot a mech through hazardous terrain to get from point A to point B, repairing the mech along the way.

I want to focus on developing engaging game mechanics, that creates feelings of tenseness and excitement to entertain and challenge players.

My main inspiration for this design philosophy is an indie game from solo developer Mike Klubnika, called "The Other Side", which has players maintain a drill to escape a dystopian bunker run by harsh rulers who want no one to leave.

I like how Klubnika makes the proccess of maintaining the drill feel very manual, rather than just a single button prompt like in many modern games. It helps to pressure players into engaging with the game world to ensure a grounded expirence.

Other games that provided inspiration were "Subnautica", with its vehicle system, as well and of course the "Titanfall" franchise, for its imersive player to mech expierence thats created through its UI and UX.

Game Jam 1:

In the first week of our Game Jam "It Spreads!", I strarted developing some of my games core base mechanics, such as

Player Movement
Player Camera
Player Item Interaction
Mech Refueling/Repairing

I made these mechanics fit into the Game Jam's prompt by having players pick up toast and butter, and dispense them into toast and butter collectors, which are connected to health bars for each respective resource, that need to be refilled over time by players so that the butter can be 'spread' onto the toast.

Player Controller:

My player movement is based on moving a rigidbody, since it means I can have physics interaction's between my game world and the player.

Currently players can move in all directions, look around using a first person camera, sprint by changing their set speed with a state handler, crouch by changing their set scale, and jump by adding a set force upwards.

Player Interaction:

Since I need players to be able to move around and carry resources, I followed a tutorial to develop a player interaction system. This allows my player to pick up an item, and move it in the game world, and have physics interactions.

And when players move the item into a resource collector, the items collider will trigger, be destroyed and increase the healthbar for that component if they match tags.

Resource Collectors:

The Resource collectors in the Game Jam will end up being the components of the mech in the final game that will need refueling and repairing. When active, the healthbar thats paired to them will deplet over time.

I also made a button that players can press to toggle the the depletion of a mech components healthbar.

Just calling the event through a refence to another script didnt want to work, but after some help from my lecturer, it turns out using Unity's Event System was an easy solution. This allows for toggle function of the mech part to be called by invoking the function through an event when the player presses the button.

Component Flowchart:

While I want players feel pressured to keep up with mech maintenance, I don't want to overwhelm them with too much to keep track of. So in the actual game, players will only need to worry about a key few components, that are demanding but still manageable.

Another feature I'd like to implement is seperate consequences for each mech componet fully depleting, as shown in the chart to the left. This would mean players will need to play smart, and prioritise certain componenets depending on how they have stocked up on resources.