Shaw

Overview

  This is a 2-D diegetic adventure game. The video of this game is shown below :

Motivation

  We wants to make the story of game more meaningful and we choose the topic language violence. Our hero has a friend named Shaw and this game is the adventure he takes to find his friend, however the people around him all think that Shaw does not exist and made language violence to him. This game wants to make players think deeply about the mentioned problem. And we plan to add the element shadow(which implies the real identity of Shaw) to make the game have more playability.

Gameplay

  The following picture shows in the tutorial level and presents the basic operation of this game:

The basic operations: arrows for movement, space for jump and Shift for releasing shadows

  Below are the pictures of the scenes in the tutorial level, and the player need to control the hero to pass all the obstacles in the scene, and if falls on the ground he will be dead and start this level again:

The scenes in the level

  After the tutorial level the obstacles are of the same type with the tutorial level but are invisible:

  If the player move or jump, he will be blocker but the obstacles but can not see them, and player may fail at unseen obstacles: 

  So here comes the core gameplay of the game: controlling shadows to probe the obstacles, if the shadow dies at one position, the player will know that there is a hidden obstacle and will jump to avoid this:

  After passing this level, the game will play the playback of the process of passing this level including all the death part:

Death playback video 1

Death playback video 2

  After passing all the levels we add an ending movie for the game which shows that the hero ends up with his shadow, which implies that he was hurt deeply by the others' words:

Ending movie

  When realizing the function of the player’s death playback, we found that there is a problem that animations are too many to mange. After doing some experiments , I designed and implemented a special pipeline to receive shadow state and position. An algorithm to layer the state machine and the presentation of the animation is combined with the pipeline. The state machine records and outputs the corresponding animation parameters and real-time positions of the shadows in the pipeline. Finally, the shadow animation and position stored in the pipeline are popped up and played successively. This method realized the function of player’s death reviewing without the management problem and the problem of coupling with the game logic script.

  To improve the scene's picture quality, we applied Unity’s Post-Process and SMAA anti-aliasing graphics algorithm. The methods optimized scene lighting and screen effects very well as can be seen in the video.