Fig. 1 : Main Menu screen
As part of my studies at UQAC, I followed the 8INF960 course "Principes de conception/dév. de Jeux Vidéo" (principles of design and development of video games). This course is intended to teach students from any level the bases of Game Design, as well as the necessary team management skills needed for any well-realized project.
In this course, each team was expected to bring to fruition a game from start to finish, with every design step along the way, following the theme "You are your own enemy".
Since I already had experience with game designing and programming, I took the role of Project Leader in my team, composed of three other students, all without any prior experience. After meeting the team and making a very small project to evaluate the skills and preferences of each team member, we moved on to the first phase of the project: brainstorming and choosing the game concept.
Fig. 2 : initial one-pager proposals
Each member of the team developed the terms and ideas that were associated with the theme and could assemble the ideas into simplified one-pagers in order to compare them with the other ideas. By choosing this format, we forced ourselves to condense our ideas into elevator pitches and kept them in the same format to compare them fairly.
Many interesting ideas emerged from this session: turning the player's decisions against them, making the player fight themselves, or developing the theme around mental illnesses.
However, we settled on a concept we found more original and interesting to explore: the player would try to find ways to kill themselves in-game. Here is the basic pitch for our game concept :
"One Way Out: the player is trapped in a building filled with strange contraptions and rooms. They must find how to combine and interact with the environment to progress and trigger deaths."
Throughout the production phase, I helped each team member get their bearing on Unity in order to make them progress and create a fun experience. To coordinate the team, we used a shared Figma page (part of it is visible in Fig 2) to be able to have everyone's ideas on the same plane, and a single place to have all our ideas compiled.
One of the main aspects we designed using the Figma file was the NarrativeTree. Since our game relied on the association of items to unlock new rooms and craft new items, we needed a way to know what actions were needed to progress to a new area or to obtain a new item. Slightly different from a Decision Tree, the narrative tree allowed us to represent the situation of the game and what the player had access to at any given moment, by representing in a simplified version of the requirements for each step.
Fig 3. Entire Narrative Tree
As this figure shows, this project was quite ambitious and had already quite a few elements to think of. In this diagram, each separate graph is a separate room, yellow blocks represent individual items, red blocks are items coming from a different room, green blocks are "endings" (or "deaths"), grey blocks are doors to other rooms, and finally blue blocks are the Keys.
These Keys helped define the main path of the game (the darker arrows on the diagram), and gave a clearer objective to the player. They would have to collect these keys through various different deaths, in order to unlock the final ending door, leading to the True Ending.
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During this project, I got the opportunity to put into application many of the team management lessons I took during my studies, and I learned a lot from my teammates as well. As a matter of fact, taking the role of a sort of teacher to help every member of the team how to use Unity, structure the project and their work, think around certain issues, etc... has helped me a lot in figuring out for myself how I usually work around these matters. This also helped me better scope my projects, as I needed to plan the possible workload based on each member's abilities from the start of the project to its conclusion.
In the end, the project did not go as far as I had expected it to, as I was too ambitious in the designing phase of the project. I would very much like to be able to work on this project again in the future, as I believe the vision behind this game has true potential if worked on properly and without tight time constraints.
[Game unavailable for download because of licensing]
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