Overthink
Create a vertical slice of a Puzzle game (Solo Project)
Antichamber is probably one of my favorite puzzle game. Since I wanted to work on various facets of game programming, I firstly challenged myself by trying to create the same type of Render in Unity, and it evolved into a game demo. Here is a non exhaustive list of things I wanted to work/deepen. For more technical details go check the project's GitHub.
The rendering
First thing I wanted to work was reproduce an outline post-process, and work the unique render Antichamber has to offer.
After some customizations in the Unity lightning pipeline, I managed to create a lighting kind of similar to Antichamber.
Comparative: Antichamber (Left) / Overthink (Right)
The features
I wanted to break through some Antichambers secrets, which explains why some features are really similar. Especially that famous room where every stairs lead to the same place, and this is how I discovered Non-Euclidean tunnels.
Another very visual mechanic I was interested in was the stencil buffer. This gave birth to one of my first puzzle.
And then I started creating my own mechanics. I have created a sequence of little mechanics without logical continuation that bring you to the result you can observe. I admit it, the Game Design is poor but the main purpose of my project was a technical challenge!
Among all systems I did, the interfacing is probably the one that stands out. Handling the navigation with Keyboard/Controller at any moment without losing focus, changing display,... I am really satisfied with the final result that allow me to handle lots of specific cases.
Accessibility
Except all the marketing reasons that make studios focus on it, I think there is a lot of innovation potential. Giving the possibility to everyone to play a game needs a lot of upstream work.
I understood through a TED conference talking about colorblind that colorblind filters are not the best option. Avoiding communication with color is the best practice when you can communicate other ways. Which made me rethink some of my puzzles.
For accessibility purpose, I spent the most of my time working on the input rebinder. It required a lot of refactor due to two things:
- I changed the logic to make my game work with the input binding system.
- I have integrated the New Input System API. I needed some times to understand how it works since it is very different to Unity native input system.
It might looks like this is not a lot of job but cumulated with other game settings, this was probably where I spent the most of my time for Overthink development.
Feel free to check the result of this UI work at the bottom of the page.
TL;DR
Having approached a production from various angles, gameplay, rendering, sound (composition, design and programming), various settings... and achieving such project in parallel to my work at Midgar Studio, helped me improve some skills I couldn't work while developing Edge Of Eternity.
Obviously I learned new programming stuff but I also learned a lot about accessibilty's best practices to make accessibility part of a game. I also took time to self train with new API which is (let's agree) part of a programmer's job.
If you don't want to play but still want to see the result, please take a look to the screens and the walkthrough!