Misplaced

CONTROLS:

W, A, S, D - movement

Z - dialog

E - interact with certain items

I - inventory

P - pause 

Left Mouse - clicking on buttons and inventory items.

Overview 

Out team released a game that is all about survival during conflict, the cycle of violence, & inspired by real life ev…well you know what. It’s meant to be from a child’s perspective, which alongside the graphic novel, Footnotes in Gaza, influenced much of the art direction. This game is meant to partially subvert typical gameplay as the player is often punished by having their sanity diminished for grabbing every item they come across. NPC dialog offers many clues on how to traverse the game with the most sanity intact, but your sanity bar does not determine your ability to beat the game. It merely dictates, which one of the multiple endings a player might receive upon completion. 

Development Process:

• Brainstorming:

This project began with a brainstorming session on what type of game we wanted to create. As we reflected on current events, we came up with the idea of depicting a scenario where our players would fight for their life in the middle of an armed conflict that would be meaningful and more like an interactive experience. We drew some of our inspiration from games such as Don't Starve Together, TWELVE MINUTES, This War of Mine, as well as the graphic novel, Footnotes in Gaza. 

• Building Process:

From the very start, we divided the design process into three scenes and we divided the workload between the three of us. We had a couple of kick-off calls to lay out the storyline we would like for the game, and then laid out all of the major mechanics for each scene. 

Afterward, we also had a list of each art asset we needed to create in-house. Hanna was mainly working on the art creation and animated cut scenes, while Roshan built the 1st & 2nd scenes, and Tian built the 3rd scene. Once we had all the mechanics laid out, we replaced all of the temporary art place-holders.

• Playtest Feedback:

From two playtests, here are some notes:

1. We need clear visual instruction: how to control the character, how to interact with NPC or environment elements
2. when life/sanity is decreasing, we need to make it more obvious that the player is hurting
3. Some of the elements in 3rd scenes have negative z value, which should not be the case
4. UI Font: to change it into something that fits into the world setting
5. Adding fade-in: between the scene
6. Update the key item in the 3rd scene to make it fit into the story: replacing the sailing licenses with the key
7. Soldiers in 3rd scenes, when chasing players, want to make them able to shoot a bullet
8. Rigidbody: we have one rigid body attached to the player's parent and another attached to the player's child as the feet. This setup has caused some issues when player push objects or pick up items

• Revisions:

From both playtest feedbacks, we made some changes to our build within a limited amount of time:

1. We streamlined the player’s journey, adding more visual pop-up roads as the environmental design to guide the player and also leaving some space for players to explore themselves
2. Roshan set up the audio cues for decreasing health and sanity, which is triggered whenever players take damage. This way, it would be clearer when the player is taking damage. 
3. We did an overall bug check for all elements in our scenes to remove the Z value to make sure it is not causing any collision issues
4. We updated the time-count-down font and also replaced the pixel sanity bar with Hanna’s new sketch to make it clearer to our players. 
5. Updated the NPC dialogue and key items in the third scene to make it more convincing storytelling. 
6. Updated soldiers in 3rd scenes, adding stop trigger, player detection, and walk animation
7. Rigidbody: We did not end up removing the rigid body on the player’s child. Instead, we fixed interactive elements in each scene because many of the scripts are set up as detectors of both player’s rigid body and its’ child’s; if we simply simplified the rigidbody structure, most of the code would not work, and it may cause much greater delay. 

Postmortem Devlog

Success:

Overall, we are proud of what we have accomplished. Considering the amount of art assets and level of design we had, we achieved most of the main mechanics we thought about. Also, because we were able to create a soundtrack and art sprites ourselves, we built a believable world for the character. Especially the design for sanity, which connects the postprocessing visual design with our puzzles or moral choices design. 

Challenges:

Some of the key challenges we faced were:

1. Creating the art:  All of the artwork was handmade by Hannah and Roshan. 
2. Sound and Music Design: Similar to art design, Roshan designed all the audio cues and built those into the player controller script. So whenever a certain function is being called from a player’s behavior, we have an audio effect accompanying it to indicate to players what is occurring. The soundtrack was also created by Roshan, which added to the immersive experience.
3. Player’s rigid body: the way it interacts with the environment(pushed boxes, bullet, knockback, interactable NPC)
4. The general layer and Sorting layer of game object: Because we are working on something that has so many different elements(NPC, solid object, grass, ocean, animated background). We spent a lot of time playtesting/bug-fixing the interactions between each layer
5. Count-down system: Roshan built the count-down system on top of the screen as a key element to the game, where players are constantly facing the pressure of finishing the game before the timer runs out. 
6. To play with Canvas and make sure the system is successfully carried to the next scenes is crucial.
7. Health/Sanity Manager: As we mentioned before, having both health and sanity is the first thing we thought about. Tian worked on the rough draft of the health manager system, which involved canvas, slider elements, and calling different types of damage from different scripts(burn the tick, bullet damage, bomb damage, sanity damage on collision, etc.). Later, we also refined it by combining multiple damage scripts with the master health/sanity manager.

What we learned:

For us, the greatest lesson we learned was how to design a game as a team that we could deliver by a set deadline. We had to really think ahead about how we wanted to divide the work and collaborate on this project. 

Further Improvements

• some of the item pick-up stuff isn't always consistent.
• some of the bullets don't point the correct way in the third scene
• more sanity effects, more endings. 
• The brother NPCs should also disappear when their arc is done
•  Rescuing the "trapped" NPC out of boulders could have more polished   
• Perhaps a missile launches on the screen and add an electricity effect for a fence
• Incorporate a day & night cycle
• An updated dialogue system: letting NPCs have different branches of reaction/dialogue, where player choice will matter. 

Credits: all visual art assets were hand drawn by Roshan & Hannah. All of the SFX and music were made and  composed by Roshan except for 4 sounds: the ocean waves, the fire sfx, the air siren, and the little girl laughing. These four sounds were all procured from freesound.org.