CROSSING
CROSSING
CROSSING
MICHAEL KIRBY
PIVOT
For my project theme I chose A Small World from the Ludum Dare website, I wanted to make something more interesting than a simple 2D platformer game . So I decided to create a project inspired by the hit indie game “FEZ”, I wanted to take the original concept of the game and further develop it. You play as Pivot a one eyed being with the ability to rotate the world in 3D space. This game is a tranquil puzzle game with only two types of hazards, red glitching spikes and falling off platforms. There is no lives system as Player respawns straight after they die, I did this so it makes the more challenging puzzles less frustrating to the Player and makes them want to carry on with the game rather than quit it.
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A pixel art puzzle game inspired by Fez, made for a university project. Hoping to continue to work on it and further develop the project.
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GAMEPLAY
Below is a video of gameplay.
PROTOTYPING
In this project, I wanted to my skills with 2D games, so I decided to create a 'FEZ' inspired game with a rotation mechanic that can add extra depth to my 2D game. To kick things off, I started by setting up my Unity project for a 2D game. I used planes and basic Unity sprites to quickly prototype my scene in the Engine.
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From that point I could start to work on my player controller, but during my mock-ups and notes I realized a 2D control scheme would not work for what I wanted to do. So I had to think within a 3D space for my new player controller.
ROTATE MECHANIC
I faced a few issues while working on this project, a few of them I managed to overcome while others I had to cut from the game. One of the issues that I faced was with the rotation mechanic itself, originally I had it set so the room rotates but this created issues with the Player falling off platforms and out of the room. This was because the Player wasn’t rotating with the room. So I had to experiment with rotating the Player as well but with no success. However after playing “FEZ” I realized that it looked like the camera was being rotated rather than the world. So I assigned the rotating script to the camera and my problem was fixed, because the room was rotating with the player as well. A new problem came up though with the camera flying away from the room and the Player. After looking online to figure out what to do, I noticed some people attach the camera to an empty game object and use it as pivot which would be the one to have the rotating script on it rather than the camera. This proved to be successful as the pivot point rotated around the Player with the room, which as a result the camera didn’t fly off anymore.
PUZZLE DESIGN
Puzzle room designs proved to be quite challenging to do, as I had to think carefully about the design of them. I tried to make a tall room for the vertical rotating, but due to being unable to get it to work I had to make a compromise. I repurposed the tall room and added boxes with red spikes attached to them. Another puzzle room I made was a maze one, this one I had to organize the maze layout carefully. I created a different box texture so the boxes that reveal the entrance is clear and I added tables so the Player can see roughly where they are going and are trying to get to.
PROBLEM SOLVING
The one problem I faced that I couldn’t solve was the vertical rotation assigned to a lever switch. This would have given my levels extra depth and would taking the concept further.
I got part of this code to work, when the Player activates the switch the room would rotate vertically however two issues would always arise. The first one being a similar issue to the one faced previously with the room rotating without the Player. The second issue was if I had multiple lever switches the rotation would skip, which resulted odd situations and even force the Player out of the room. Unfortunately due to time I had left I decided to cut it from the game.