First Project BioBot Progress

I'm having a nice 2 week long break and graduating from high school very soon. What better way is there to spend the last school break than participating in an exciting game jam. This time, I teamed up with some of my friends and worked on a game jam entry for GoedWare Game Jam #5.

The theme of the game jam is "Love, Death & Robots" (with a subtheme being "the price of freedom"). From the start, I wanted to include both of the theme aspects to the game. Yet, it was quite hard to come up with an idea that's unique, creative and has fun gameplay.

At first glance when I heard "Love, Death & Robots", I thought of a game where the player turns into a robot after death (most likely an accident?). This would allow the player to extend their love towards their partner even after death. While this idea sounded interesting on its surface, I was having doubts about its originality. If I recall correctly, this idea has been exposed to the general public multiple times via e.g. films, games, books, etc.

After about an hour of brainstorming with my friend, we came up with slightly more interesting idea. The following is a setting of the game (I will not be going over too much about the story of the game. In this (and the following) devlog(s), we'll be prioritizing on how we made the game):

A company called Biobotic Technologies have been working on a project called "BioBot", where they are essentially able to turn humans into robots. Biobotic Technologies thought robot workers is far more efficient than having human workers, as robots don't get tired unlike humans. They also figured by limiting robot's emotions, they'll be able to turn humans into more neutral, conscientious workers. It can be seen as a win-win situation, because the stress that humans receive can also be reduced significantly, if their emotions are controlled.

Once we had a setting, we had to come up with an immersive background story. Now, originally I came up with an idea where the player participates in this program and turns himself into a worker and then goes into a (laptop) factory to work. Although, I quickly had to scrap this idea. Mostly because, it was a bit absurd that such a powerful company, Biobotic Technologies would create a revolutionary technology just to make laptops more efficiently.

Instead, we decided to make a testing facility. Biobotics Technologies would like to perform human trials and needs voluntary human. Protagonist (fairly poor), participates in this program, as they have promised a large amount of money in return. The whole gameplay is about player in this testing facility.

Even before when the game jam has started, our team agreed on making a puzzle game. We always wanted to make a puzzle game some time, this game jam was just a perfect opportunity for us to do so. Because the game was about being tested in a testing facility, we could just add puzzle mechanics in the testing rooms.

Once our idea was set, we started with actually making the game. We used Unity3D for our engine. To allow more immersive experience, we decided to go with first person perspective in a 3D environment. This way, we figured it would be easier for us to communicate between the player and the game. One of our goals was to help player to feel like they are playing a robot role.

I'm currently working on another first person game, so creating a first person controller wasn't a difficult task. I've also introduced some parkour mechanics to the game to allow more freedom of movement. However, it should be clear that the game we are making isn't focused too much on movement. Puzzle mechanics still had to remain as our top priority.

Indoor environments are generally easier to design and create. This is because there aren't as many things to take account for compared to making an outdoor environment. For instance, in an outdoor environment, one should focus on different viewing angles and overall mood that the environment can deliver. This is necessary to create an interactive map. In contrast, because players already feel "limited" by the walls surrounding them in a room (indoor environment), there isn't much to consider. Aspects like creating a beautiful viewing angle or delivering different mood depending on player's position can be discarded. This is also one of the reason why we went with the testing facility idea instead of a laptop factory. Laptop factory is considerably bigger than a testing facility, so there may be more difficulties in creating this map. As a small team of developers, one of us, programmers, had to take over the role of map designer, so it'd make sense to make a map that is simplest, yet most effective to develop.

Puzzle mechanics are still to be thought of in more detail. Making a puzzle game requires a lot of thinking, as we had to come up with a creative solution every puzzle level. With that being said, we also didn't want to make the puzzles too difficult. Games in game jams should be simple to play and have fun. We want everyone to play the game through and see the ending. We are thinking of adding a small "hint" text as well, if the player gets stuck in a puzzle for a certain period of time.

We went a little bit too ambitious with the planning. Because we designed the game with story with mind, we wrote dialogues (to be said by the voice actors) for different cut scenes, different endings, etc. We are still unsure if we can finish the game within the time limit, we are definitely having massive fun so far. We've never such an ambitious game for a gamejam, let alone we didn't even attempt to make a game with this scale. We are afraid, but we can't stop ourselves from going forward.