Since my last post I have mainly been focusing on improving the look and feel of the game. The feedback from my interim report indicated that the project was impressive from a technical design and programming standpoint but that it lacked "design substance", making it feel generic due to the lack of narrative or thematic art and sound. Although I am intentionally opting for a more stark, minimalist presentation style to convey a sense of unease and to allow me and the player to focus on the procedural systems, I concede that adding some more flavour to this meal ought to make it less bland, motivating the player to engage with the mechanics.
The game now opens into a main menu scene. Here we have a title, and two buttons. My current working title is Data Purge, but that may change, I just needed something to use to see if the menu looked right. The font used, Mayfair NBP (https://www.fontspace.com/mayfair-nbp-font-f15853) helps to contribute to the dark sci-fi themes of the game. Of course the new game button takes you to the game and the quit button closes the program. I have added the procedural lighting system from the game scene to this menu scene and placed cubes behind the buttons to catch the light, allowing the scene to change colour and cast shadows around the buttons. The light in the menu has an increased change rate of 0.1, up from 0.01, as I want the player to notice the colour shift in the short time they will be on that screen. The max and min intensity of the light are both reduced by 0.5 down to 2 and 1 respectively. This was done to give the menu a calmer but darker and more ominous tone. The shadow mode was also swapped over to soft shadows rather than hard as, although I enjoy the stark contrast granted by the hard shadows in-game, when this close-up the hard shadows look pixelated.
Addressing the elephant in the room; no, the game is not bugged, the graphical glitching and background noise are intentional. I imported a graphical glitch asset pack from the unity store (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/realistic-glitches-lite-107974) and added the CRT and Bleeding Colours scripts to the camera with the following settings:
Within the game, you are controlling a person in the near future, who in turn is trapped endlessly playing the game we see in the generated scene so that an evil overlord AI can learn from their neural activity to better combat those few people left to fight against it. This type of dystopian sci-fi narrative is most commonly found in 80s Cyberpunk literature such as Neuromancer (William Gibson 1984), so to evoke that retro feel and to reflect the themes of malfunctioning technology, I added those shaders and sounds. The background noise is a combination of three separate looping sounds being played on top of each other; some feedback, some static crackling and some white noise. This combination playing quietly in the background creates an unsettling atmosphere without being annoying to listen to.
Once the new game button is pressed and we enter the generated scene, you will notice that once again our view is filtered through the CRT and Bleeding Colour shaders. The values have been tweaked however to ensure a clear view of the game while still providing an interesting aesthetic. The white noise is gone however, replaced with music. The old playlist of generic music is gone, instead we now have a curated set of sci-fi themed electronic music. I explained my choice of music and the changes I have made to the sound effects over in the GDD so I will just copy that here:
Music: Music is played constantly during the game. When the game starts a random song is selected from a list of 20 and played, once it finishes, another random song is played, this continues indefinitely. This randomisation provides more variety to the game as although the player may have seen a level before, playing through it with a different soundtrack can alter their perception of that experience. The songs all belong to the “Synthwave” sub-genre of electronic music. Synthwave is inspired by the “Cyberpunk” sub-genre of Sci-Fi literature such as Neuromancer (William Gibson 1984) and films such as Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982). Cyberpunk, and therefore Synthwave, centres around themes of dystopian futures, artificial intelligence and what it means to be human. As such, this choice of music also evokes these themes within the game.
Footsteps: All characters have access to a list of footstep sounds. These are specifically footsteps on metal to reinforce the sci-fi setting despite the environment looking non-metallic. While moving the character will constantly play random footstep sounds from the list at a rate scaling with their movement speed. This adds variety to the footsteps so they do not become monotonous and ensures they always align with the character’s movement.
Ability Sounds: When an ability is activated, a casting sound is selected at random from a list. These sounds give the impression of an energy source charging up. When the cast is complete and the ability is fired, the charge sound is stopped and an ability firing sound is spawned in the world at the character’s location. The ability firing sound is selected at random from a list of sounds which imply a sudden release of power.
Another change I have made is that I have added new VFX and they now change colour to match the user, blue for the player and red for enemies. This should help with visual clarity.
Pressing Escape now pauses the game by setting the timescale to 0. I also have a check on the player and enemy controllers which means that nothing in the update function like inputs will work if the game is paused as otherwise this would work as normal. The regular UI is also deactivated while paused and replaced with a pause menu from which you can resume, restart, or return to main menu. When paused a black and white filter is also applied to the camera from the same pack as the others.
On player death, a VRAM corruption shader is applied and louder white noise is played for a second, shocking the player and increasing the impact of their death, before the player is taken to a game over scene similar to the main menu. From here they can go to menu, start a new game or quit. The red game over text juxtaposes the green title on the main menu, indicating a start and an end to the playthough.
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