My Portfolio
To Start
Early Matinee Sequence
To start things off, I'd like to show you first a very early matinee sequence for the game. This sequence was rendered and processed through Adobe AfterFx. The sequence, however, is rendered at runtime during the start of the game, more specifically the main menu. It plays as a "background" canvas to the menu buttons and waits to switch cameras to another area of the map when the player is ready to start.
The idea behind the matinee was to try to capture the essence of the game itself in one moving image. I wanted to try to capture the feel of a pseudo "rubik's cube" with intricate puzzle solving problems.
The Game
Concepts and design
The primary concept of the game is one that most people are probably familiar with, a simple 3d maze. I wanted to add additional elements onto this while learning the basics of the game engine itself. For the first phase of this game I'm developing key and core concepts while building fluid gameplay and libraries of assets to draw on for future IP's. In the future I'll be looking to implement virtual reality and Oculus Rift support to a more dynamic, yet similar IP.
I decided to go for something small, lightweight and easy to run, so I immediately thought "mobile!" I then decided to target Android instead of iOS for a list of reasons.
Once the hard part was out of the way, I then had to come up with a gameplay idea. I decided that the player would be a physics driven ball pawn because of two factors. First, the implementation from Unreal was mostly already in place (the physics like torque and drag). The second reason was because I was able to immediately envision all of the cool things I'd be able to do on a tile based system with physics. I thought of things like ice tiles, trap tiles, explosions, gravity wells, the list went on and on. Traditionally these things would seem either out of place or just wouldn't fit with a typical "human" player. What's more is the amount of workload I could effectively divert to other places due to the lack of animating I would have to do.
So now that I had a game plan, I went to work! The gallery below currently shows how this game is shaping up right now.
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Gameplay Theory
Bringing it all together
So now that I've run through the ropes in the engine, gotten used to building and compiling for android, uploaded a few tests there to make sure it all went well, it's time to start bringing it into one cohesive game.
My theory behind this game was to create something hard. Something challenging enough that most people would be able to complete most of the game, but would require a bit of working and thinking to accomplish it.
That said, I didn't want to make something "impossible. I'm building this game to have enough levels that gradually increase in difficulty that the average player would require a lot of time to complete the entirety of the game. In essence I'm making this game to feed off of the craving to finish something that people have. The game is difficult, but is highly addicting. With the soon to be addition of procedural levels, that will also add to this feeling. I'm also implementing leaderboards and achievements via google play services to help add another layer. I will not be implementing any in game pay features, as I do not believe I should for a personal project such as this. I am, however, experimenting with ad placement and I'm on the fence about having them. I want to bring a truly free game to the market.
When it's all said and done, the game will host an astonishing amount of features, and I'm now at the stage where all I'm doing is implementing them on top of what I've already built. Complex mazes with complex puzzles to solve within them, along with traps and treacherous zones. Multi-leveled mazes, and even 3d geometrical mazes.
My next big goal for this game is to come up with a way around gravity. What I mean by this is, I want to have a cube for example. The player is able to traverse around the entirety of the outside of the cube (the maze being on all sides) while solving puzzles to get to the inside of the cube to solve the maze. I've implemented an alpha test of this feature, but it does not currently work as intended. The next big goal is to add a currency to the game, virtual "coins" the player can grab while solving the maze. I feel this important because it forces the player to make a choice between solving a maze quickly to be on the leaderboard and get more points, or to take longer to get currency to unlock certain things.
Down below is a link to Dream Plane, via google play. Please note, even though this is my capstone project, I am still completely devoted to working on it and learning more. I've currently put just under a year of work off and on with this project, and I do hope you enjoy it.
