Deep Space Nothing
October 2019 - November 2019
OVERVIEW
Deep Space Nothing is a first-person adventure game that I developed for Windows PC on my own free time. The core gameplay has the player assume the role of a newly transferred engineer who must unlock the door of the ship’s engine room by completing a series of absurd tasks given by the crew. The intention of the project is to create a NPC's that the player can both interact with in dialogue and in presence. I wanted to expand on the dialogue system I had previously made in Galium Chalice, and improve it so that it could reference game objects within the game world, whether that meant objects the player could pick up or doors that would unlock when a certain condition was met.
MY ROLE
Modifying the dialogue system for 3D Characters
I spent most of the time development programming and designing the game’s dialogue system so that its workflow was streamlined for myself, and possibly someone else if they were to use it in their game. One of the first improvements I made with the system was making it work with a rigged NPC model so that the NPC would actually look at the player whenever the player was in range. I initially grey box tested this addition in using a few cubes and Quaternion rotations then once the cubes were reacting the way I wanted to, I implemented the character models that I created with Autodesk Character Creator.
NPC's will look at the player when they get within a trigger range.
This slice of code will update the NPC's IK system to have it's head look at the position of the player. In addition, it displays a UI prompt when the player is within interaction range.
Game world reacts to player dialogue
I added an Event Handler to the parent class that every NPC’s dialogue inherits from so that I could reference game objects if the situation called for it. If for example, a player wallk up to an object, interacts with it via the dialogue system and picks it up, then I could use the Event Handler to destroy the game object.
Player responses can be assigned an events that reference other game objects. In this case, each of the player's responses will unlock the engine room door on the ship
In this example, the door will only unlock after the player triggers that specific event in the dialogue system. This is a weird example becuase the player could just walk around the door, but I think this gif is still a good example regardless
Other UI Elements
I made a UI popup for when the player gets within range of an interactable NPC. The canvas that holds the UI elements is in itself managed by a script that activates it whenever the player presses the “interact” button. To make the dialogue system feel less like a slide show, I made the dialogue box print each letter as it was reading the script. On top of that, I had animated sprites of each character appear as that were talking so that was at least some representation of their mouth moving.
ScriptableObjects were used to customize the attributes of each NPC, including animatiions, name, voice, and font style.
CHALLENGES
Inconsistent Narrative
I’ll be frank and say that while I am happy with the way that the dialogue system turned out, other aspects like the lighting, animation variety and overall presentation could be improved. The combination of Autodesk Character Creator and space assets by Creepy Cat create a inconsistent visual style that I think is a detriment to the player’s immersion in the game world. Granted, the haphazard writing of did on the OGH’s dialogue probably compounds the inconsistent presentation of the game, but I guess that was inevitable given the short time frame I gave myself to develop the game.