Overview:

 

DEEP is a 2D puzzle platformer utilizing a light/dark mechanic.  Players lose health when in the dark and regain it in the light.  Levels are progressed by solving puzzles using switches, reflectors, pull blocks and moving platforms in order to light a safe path through the level.  The next level can be accessed once three hidden crystals are illuminated in the current level.

 

Role: Technical Design/Implementation

Responsibilities:

 

• Work with team to design core mechanics and draft code tests for implementation

• Implement all core mechanics in full

• Implement menu screens and level transitions

• Implement audio, art and animations

• create modular level pieces for use by Level Designer

Design Challenges:

 

This project had a number of interesting design challenges, first and foremost being the light system.  After initially drafting the concept for one, I was able to locate a plugin called 2DVLS that ended up being appropriated to create the dynamic 2D lights.  After acquiring the plugin, I set up event calls and binary states for each object in the level; something is either illuminated or dark.  Raycasts from the lights toggled objects between the two states accordingly.  Most environmental objects had two different sprites corresponding to each state.  This allowed us to create the illusion of things being illuminated by the light system.
 

Another challenge was designing and creating the health indicator.  Early on in the pre-production stage we decided that there should be no UI elements within the game.  All information should be provided using game ingredients.  To display health we settled on a light bubble system that shrunk as the player took damage and grew as they regained health.  To make sure the change in health was noticeable and draw attention to importance of the bubble I created a system that colored the game world that was overlapped by the health bubble.  Everything else was rendered in grayscale.  To do this, one camera was set up with a gray scale filter script that rendered everything in the scene, while another camera was set up that rendered everything in color.  This second camera had its viewport focused on the immediate area around the player and had a dynamic circle mask shader applied to it, with the shader's radius linked to the player’s health pool.

 

 

Lastly, this being my first game, all the intractable ingredients were definitely fun to figure out.  DEEP featured switches, movable blocks and ladders as things the player could directly affect.  In order to make the switch ingredient easy to use for our Level Designer, I created a prefab which has a public reference and all affect-able objects extended from one class.  The Level Designer simply needed to drag in a switch, drag the object he wanted to be affected as a reference, and the switch's script handled all the logic from there.  The movable blocks were a combination of a 2D rigid body, a box collider, a circle collider and two trigger zones.  The box collider had no interactions with terrain and was simply there to give the ingredient a square presence when encountered by the player.  The circle collider is what actually kept the block on the ground.  I specifically used a circle collider in order to prevent the block from getting caught on our tiled terrain.  The triggers were used as points of interaction by the player.  Standing in either trigger on the left or right of the block and pressing 'E' generated a hinge between the player and the block, allowing the block to be dragged.