Kioku
Platform: PC
Genre: Narrative, Stealth
Engine: Unity (C#)
Duration: 48h (Global Game Jam - King)
Year: 2020
Role: Programmer
My goal for this year's game jam was to have the most fun making games with friends as well as sharing our knowledge amongst the team, so as the only programmer of the group I did my best to mentor Kris during his first time making games and using Unity. The theme for the game jam was "Repair" and so our game follows the story of a musician who has lost his memory and is now exploring his consciousness, collecting memory fragments to repair his memories. For each memory the player collects, we present them a part of this musician's past and after the player restored all of his memories, they get to see the whole story complete. Depending on how the player does, a special memory might be shown at the end of the game that could change the perception of what actually happened in this musician's life.
You can download the game here: csdiabo.itch.io/kioku
Link to the GGJ page of the game: https://globalgamejam.org/2020/games/kioku-2
My work
For this project, being the only programmer, there quite a lot to do! Firstly started with setting up our version control, Git and making sure we were all on the same page in how we were going to use it. For example, we would have the main level that should only be worked on by one person at a time and all of the other team members would do their work on a duplicate of that main level in the meantime. As the project was set up, it was time to start implementing some of the basic features of the game, in this case, the movement. Then moved on to create some basic AI enemies that patrol the map and will chase the player if it gets within range while also giving the opportunity to escape. The enemies' meshes would only be shown if they were inside the player's outer light ring and would trigger the chase if inside the inner light ring. The last thing necessary for our MVP was to create the functionality for our memory pick-ups to trigger a timeline and pause the game while that's happening.
At this stage, we still had a bit of time so we wanted to first make our gameplay a bit more exciting, to do so we introduced a mechanic that would allow for a more stealthy approach to avoiding enemies and a good opportunity to create tension. This involved dimming the light of the player, making it so the enemies would be invisible until they were in much closer proximity as well as reducing the player's speed. This also means that the enemies would only start chasing the player when they were in a much closer radius as well, creating some variety to the ways you can interact with enemies.
Lastly, I created some UI for the game, this included a start screen and a pause menu in which you could change the in-game mouse sensitivity as well as go back to the starting menu.