Unexpected Journey

Last update: 04/24/2020

A man finds himself in a strange world one day. Could he find his way back home? Lets help him.

Journal

This is one of the most complex assignment I have ever worked on. There are many aspects to cover in order to finish it.  From game design to game programming, and with a little bit of art & animation, I feel like I am a one-man-studio while doing this project.

On the technical side, it is not difficult to code the whole things. The hardest part is to build separate components in order to make them communicate with each other, working together in harmony. I taught myself a few new tricks during the process. I could speak of a few things:

-          Story Progression Manager/Monitor: This component oversees the story progression. It knows every character, item, action that player has interacted with put that into a record and decides to unlock the next part in the story accordingly. With this component, I can easily add/remove quests, assign actions to finish quest, change interaction type at run time.

-          Load character dialogues from files: This component automatically checks and loads every in- game dialogue text file in the Asset folder. This saved me a lot of time in creating and editing texts. It also helped in memory management when I can load/unload text string from computer memory.

On the game design side, this is the hardest part. I admit I put my expectation quite high of the story. That’s why the story was a little bit complex. I understand it is quite subjective in term of creativity, but I really wanted to create a quality work.

Iteration is the final piece, I asked my friends, family, classmates to playtest the game. Their feedback are invaluable inputs that helped me improve the gameplay experience.