PLATFORM
Oculus Quest 2
Troubled Home
PLATFORM
Oculus Quest 2
ROLE
Lead Scripter, Level Designer, UI Programmer
DESCRIPTION
This project was made in around four months by me and an artist, and worked with a workshop class of teenagers to provide input on what should be in the game.
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This was a short exploration/puzzle game created as part of Belfast PEACE IV Local Action Plan under the Building Positive Relations Transform for Change project.
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Troubled Home was my first freelance project I have created.
YEAR
2022
GENRE
Historical
PLATFORM
PC
PICKING UP OBJECTS
At the beginning of the project, we decided that I would be one of the the main 3D modellers for the group. Throughout the next month or so, we quickly realised that having three modellers and one programmer was a bad idea, so this quickly changed. Being one of the more skilled programmer out of the three of us, I decided to move over to programming, while still helping the modellers if they needed it.
At the beginning of the project, we decided that I would be one of the the main 3D modellers for the group. Throughout the next month or so, we quickly realised that having three modellers and one programmer was a bad idea, so this quickly changed. Being one of the more skilled programmer out of the three of us, I decided to move over to programming, while still helping the modellers if they needed it.
The core of this game from the start was always being able to interact with and view objects. Each one would correspond to a different area, for example music or TV that came out in 1972. I set up a base class for types of items, and left an empty function to be executed when the item was interacted with. This would give me the freedom to interchange the result of the interaction for each object.
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The objects themselves were always fun to make. For TV we used The Waltons, and for music we used This Thing Called Love from Johnny Cash, except we couldn't find a copyright-free version so I learned the song myself and covered it in place of the original song.
INVENTORY SYSTEM
This was the most complicated thing to make. I needed an inventory system so that the player could look back at previous items to find clues for puzzles in the game. We only ended up using one puzzle that corresponded to an item, but we still needed the inventory system for it.
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I made a small widget and use the artist's phone images to set up a mobile phone type frame, and set to work making the actual inventory.
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The items were defined using a combination of Datatables and Structures, then I implemented a looping system that would handle which items had been picked up. This solved the issue of empty space where there shouldn't be. For example, no matter what item was picked up first, the phone would always show that image first before any other.
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Finally, I was able to break the structure and get the image for each item, and set that as the button to press in order to view that item again.
