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Not Much Longer
Project Type
Complete Game
Date Completed
June 2022
Roles
Solo developer, designer, writer, narrative designer, programmer, sound designer, partial artist
Software and Tools Used
Unity, C#, Visual Studio, Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.NET, Audacity
A surreal experience through various eras of technology!
Make the most of your time as you flashback through the late 90s to the early 2010s and relive the technology of the times as you solve puzzles, mazes, and... riddles?
This project was part of a project for my Advanced Diploma of Professional Game Development course, which required us to choose a brief to make a game for. The brief was to create a game/experience that is experimental/expressive.
The game is intended to express the feeling of time flying by, running out of time, and the feeling of things changing rapidly around you.
To convey this, I had the game run the player through several different styles of technology from the late 90s - the early 2010s. Each time period presented by the presented technology is given a different gameplay style, so the player is never able to settle on a specific gameplay style, which also adds to the feeling of running out of time.
A design challenge found during testing was the final level, the 2010 smartphone level, in which the player must escort a ball through a maze while avoiding holes that will take the player back to the start. (This is contextualised a game on a smartphone)
The original controls involved moving the mouse from either side of the screen to rotate the maze counterclockwise or clockwise. Doing this would also temporarily pause the ball from moving to give the player a bit more control.
This, however, was found to be incredibly stressful for players, and many players ended up panicking at that section in the alpha build, which wasn't the intended reaction.
So I came up with a different, more intuitive control method. Instead of rotating the maze in 2D space, the player rotates a smartphone in 3D space, and the ball does not freeze during rotation.
This new control method worked a lot better in a couple of ways. Firstly, it made the smartphone context of the section more clear and accurate. Secondly, and most importantly, it made playing through that section better and less stressful for players.
