For the past four weeks I’ve been working on a game called A Place to Call, alongside Adam Crompton.

A Place to Call was formed around a brief focusing on creating a certain feeling, as was the other game created by the Studio 2 designers, MindState. While MindState was intended to make the player go through a range of emotional states, A Place to Call only needed to create one, and that was a sense of home.

In A Place to Call the player controls an invisible person, only represented by a set of footprints. They are in an abandoned home, having escaped the rain, and have to get warm for the night or freeze. The players must then create a fire, feed the fire, and create a comfortable living space for the night.

What went right

Project Scope

From the beginning the scope of the project was achievable, and although we changed design intent over the course of the weeks, we completed all of our goals on time. The lack of complex mechanics or interactions allowed me to lay the foundations of the games interactions easily and quickly.

While complex, the movement, interacting with objects, creating fires and creating the game flow was easy to implement, and allowed us to focus on the feeling of the game for the most part.

I also feel that the time we allocated for documentation and planning was well spent. Of the four weeks development, we dedicated an entire week on the Game Design and Technical Design documentation. This ensured we knew what direction the game was taking, and ensured a polished product.

Aesthetics

The minimalist 3D assets, lack of character, and effective sound design meant that the game quickly allows players to feel comfortable and calm in the game. The warm lighting from the fire meant that there was a nice contrast between the fire and the rest of the house. In addition the sound of rain in the background while being next to the crackle of a fire almost always brings forth comfortable memories.

What went wrong

Triggers

For interacting with objects and fireplaces, we used a trigger system, so that each object knew if it was allowed to be interacted with or not. Although it works fine, using triggers is highly prone to errors, due to the precise nature of entering and leaving the trigger zone.

If I were to implement this system again, I would partition each object to a room, and when the player enters that room (or some other trigger) the objects would then calculate the distance between the object and the player. This would mean that we would mostly bypass Monobehaviour’s event system, and interaction would be much simpler.

Audio

While the audio implemented was good, and created an atmospheric game, it was very last minute. Adam  as project lead didn’t allocate someone to this task at all during project development, leaving myself to implement it. While I have no issue with doing this, if I was specifically allocated this task (or brought it up earlier) the impact the audio could have delivered to the player could have been much larger and create a better experience.

In the future I will ensure that someone has been allocated the task of audio creation and implementation, so that it can be given the respect it deserves of our medium.

QA

Or to be more precise, the fact that we didn’t do any. Because A Place to Call was such a small game, we were able to catch most bugs and issues with game flow ourselves. However, we lacked doing full game runs that explored different objects and interactions. As a result, we only discovered some bugs and issues on the night of showing our game at the Studio exhibition. One bug that had myself scrambling to fix in the back room while people came in.

Conclusion

I feel that A Place to Call is a very strong game for the four weeks spent on it. It has the potential to remove any text element from the game, allowing us to create a story through environment and audio. I will hopefully be fleshing this game out in the future.