Before Dawn is a 2D platform game developed by our group with Godot engine. In this project, I have took part in sound effects, coding (dialogue system, randomise objects’ position) and art.
A collaboration project with:
Chai Mei Shan, Natalie Sim , Loh Wan Hui , Tjoa Wei Lin ,
Link to download our game
Project Brief
Create an interactive media in the title of Portrait. We have to depict a character through the project. After experiencing students’ works, users should be able to guess the identity of the character. We are able to choose any form of interactive media. This is a 3-months collaborative project.
Our team chose to create an interactive game. This project is our first time exploring coding and creating an actual digital game. I am really proud of the outcome.
Personally, I have encountered a lot of difficulties across the project due of lack of experience in programming. Feedbacks from our peers had really helped us to get user insight to make changes. Nights and nights of improvements had been put into the game. Little things like which dialogue should trigger the frozen mode of player, and which dialogue shouldn’t.
Brainstorming
We start from brainstorming characters we would like to depict: Siri, Sadan, Santa
- Chosen character: Santa Claus (Christmas is coming)
- Developing a house exploring game in perceptive of Santa.
Process
We decided to create a house simulation 2D platform game with Godot Engine (Game Develop Engine).
Inspired art style and game direction
Reference to Unity 2D Game: Chopin
Initial ideas and prototype
House layout
House is semi decorated with Christmas elements
- 1st floor: entrance, corridor, living room, stairs and kitchen
- 2nd floor: locked parents room, dog, stairs, baby room
- 3rd floor: kids room (2 kids), study room, stairs to attic
- attic: key location
Art style
- Art style: 2D, dark cool tone to pretend it is a robbery game (robbers usually have a big sack like Santa)
- Flashlight only shows the room that you are in.
Challenges to player
- if suspicion meter exceeds, game over
- dog- increasing suspicious meter
- floor panels- increasing suspicious meter if walk on them fastly
- packages x 2
- locked doors x 2- keys
Task: (will be randomised for replay)
- find key
- find dog food- cookies (leaving milk and cookies out for Santa Claus)
- find kids room
- stare at kids
- plant the package (Santa’s presents)
- Leave the house (after complete tasks)
Dialogues
- instruction- welcome text pops up when player enter the game
- front door- remind player to not exit the house
- dog- inform player how to stop the dog from attacking
- cookie- as treats for dog
- package- area to plant package
- level 3- remind player to observe the house decorations
- stare at kids
- baby sleeping
- escape the house when all tasks complete
- fail scene
The dialogue system is a real challenge for me. A lot of signals had to be sent from one node to another across different scenes.
A 2D area is created to be triggered when player encounter it. Then another signal has to link to the dialogue box to let the dialogue box appears. After that, a child node has to be made so the characters would pop up one by one, individually. In additional, a extra signal need to be sent to tell the original dialogue box to hide a few seconds later(a timer) when the text stop printing. This complicated procedure has to repeat for 10 times for all dialogues to appear smoothly. SADLY…
Final
Collaboration with others and creating such an interesting interactive game is a wonder experience. This game developing process is tough for all of us, we have to self-taught ourselves how to use the Godot Engine as well as how to code with the fact that most of us learn from scratch. I appreciated the outcome and our improvement.