First group project - "Anormality"

[dense pivot]

Anormality is a student team project of a "horror runner" game, where the player has to escape from an arcade before the monster catches them.

The player, while running from the monster, has to find clues about which door they have to choose in order to proceed - if they choose the wrong door, they will not progress in the game. Worse yet, if they get caught, the game is over and they have to start all over again.

Now that the description is over, this is what I've been working on for my portfolio project course, with a couple of other teammates. I think the time that I've worked on this has been extremely valuable, as I've learned so much that it'll take me hours to go through everything I've learned.
Of course this is still a work in progress, there's a LOT of content missing, we have to figure out how to make the "puzzle" system more engaging, as right now it's just "urrr left, middle or right??", etc. etc. But the progress we've made is pretty damn good and I'm quite happy with where it is headed.

Special thanks to the people on the server who've helped me with some of the issues that I've encountered, the game would look a lot different if it weren't for you guys.

Planned features:

• A more robust puzzle system
• Stealth sections
• Post processing on the camera
• More lore / story

[harsh sand]

i really like the environment, this would look incredible with shaders

[dense pivot]

@fading mantle here ya go, this is where we're at with our portfolio project right now

[dense pivot]

thanks!! i'm super happy with the artists, they understood the assignment really well

and i'm definitely hyped to start looking into shaders myself

[harsh sand]

You open for suggestions?

[dense pivot]

oh absolutely

[harsh sand]

I see the monster and i’m thinking that it doesn’t really give the player adrenaline, maybe like an fov change and heartbeat when it gets close would give more urgency, also for the chase segments where you kinda just avoid obstacles maybe something like an rng event system would be cool: so for example one can fall over or fall on another one to require you to jump or crouch under or change where your going

As for the doors a cut kinda ruins the immersion

[dense pivot]

i see i see, yeah I've been working on the monster being more terrifying (the sounds took a bit of time, and I know I can still make them better + add some more). The FoV change and heartbeat are something i'll take into account

one of my members is currently working on the obstacle system, which has some player slowdowns, pushing obstacles, a "trip" hazard to prevent the player from just holding shift the whole time - i'll give him a heads up about the rng event idea

as for the doors, yep unfortunately that's something we had to do because of the time restraints, thankfully now we have more time to work on the game
though we did get stuck on it, because we couldn't really figure out how to make the halls connect between the doors etc - so we just went with a teleportation for now

[harsh sand]

Awesome, from what i’ve done there is two ways you can connect, make the halls uniform and line them up and spawn as a prefab, or use teleportation but with a render texture with a custom portal shader as you open the door, i typically use connections to make it as seamless as possible. But basically you’d just attach an id script to the door and use a singleton to get the latest one made (test by distance from start) and then spawn the prefab then get relative position of the door on the prefab and set the position of the whole prefab with that position offset plus a few to make it so it doesn’t overlap then just delete the door on the prefab

[dense pivot]

yep currently we have it like this

using object pooling to "spawn" them in when we need em

[harsh sand]

Yeah shouldn’t be terribly hard to calculate position and move it to match, because it looks like they are consistent in size

Anyway i think this has potential to be a really cool short game

[dense pivot]

yep the hallways and the door locations are consistent in size, we did it for the artists so it's easier for them to build the halls

[harsh sand]

And a speedrunning game

[dense pivot]

but yea thanks a lot for these pointers, i'm definitely excited to implement at least some shaders

never dabbled in them before, and i'm barking at my teammates to let me work on them myself hahaha

[harsh sand]

Shaders aren’t the hardest they just seem very complicated from the outside, shader graphs for example get quite simple once you learn them

yeah but snatch that opportunity to give yourself a chance to add some

[dense pivot]

yupp, depending on how it goes i might even choose shaders as my thesis subject

[fading mantle]

whoopwhoop