End of File

Well, here we are. The following post is a duplicate of my Individual Game Design Document with, of course, the addition of video footage. Enjoy:

Conceptualisation:
As far as End of File’s original concept is concerned I found the idea fascinating and wanted to change very little. This seemed to be the general consensus from the rest of the team so we did not waste time discussing the base idea; rather we devoted our early processes to conceptualising different puzzle that revolved around the use of perspective. We tossed around alternative mechanics and the one I pushed the most was that of extrudable shapes. As wonderful as the perspective puzzles were, I found the game needed some form on interactivity, no matter how basic. The extrusion satisfied this and I utilised it in the majority of my puzzle designs. I tried to combine it with perspective (as seen in puzzles like the "Catwalk" or the "Hole in the Floor") to keep the core element of the game alive in my designs, but I also tried puzzles that isolated the extrude mechanic. Some of these were more for platforming type puzzles to satisfy that classic urge to climb about and explore. One puzzle I am particularly proud of that uses extrusion but indirectly plays on perspective is the "Gravity Shift Staircase". This was one of my first designs and by far one of my strongest and I am grateful that the James was able to implement it early so we could refine it.

Catwalk

Hole in the Floor

Gravity Shift Staircase

An idea I was able to contribute to EOF that was separate from Adrian’s original vision was the characters of Jerry and Kathleen. I found EOF’s narrative lacked a human (or more broadly, natural) touch and had the potential to alienate players and make the game an emotionless experience. I created a series of notes that are visible to the player from certain places in the EOF world. They are written as if they are embedded in the world’s code. Finding these comments gradually unravels a somewhat passive-aggressive conversation between the dominating Kathleen and apathetic Jerry. The purpose of these notes is to expand the narrative of the EOF world as well as providing some comic relief from the constant puzzles. Other ways I wanted to make EOF more natural was through the geometric “flutterbys” and “cube clouds”. Having recognisable natural elements in the blocky environment would ideally invoke a sense of comfort in players, particularly in “Jerry’s Sanctuary”, and make the world seem less uncaring.

Production:

Producing animated assets was what I sunk most of my time into. All of the doors, clouds and moving doodads in the game were my work. While Chris Read was also doing asset work in Maya, his was more environmental focussed than mine. I wanted to produce objects for both show and or the player to interact with.  I constantly kept in mind that having such a minimal aesthetic meant we ran the risk of people seeing our game as bland opposed to minimalist. Of course our mechanic dictated our aesthetic but that is no excuse to make our world boring. For that reason I wanted to fill it with a range of moving objects that showed that this strange environment the player is exploring is alive, emphasised further by the natural elements I mentioned earlier. Many of the doodads serve no other purpose than to look cool and move on their own, but that is just fine. The colour coding used in EOF means players can tell what is important straight away, so I was free to make my assets as excessive-yet-pointless as I wanted.

Of the numerous puzzles and environments that feature in EOF, six puzzles and two intermission spaces were of my design. As the majority of them are stair-based extrusion with a defining feature or two, they are quite mathematical in the way they are made. I drew inspiration from the idea that these spaces would be produced by code. I tried to make the other spaces follow a pattern but utilise more interesting shapes for variety.

The soundtrack of EOF was produced by Chris and I. I only ended up making two of the eight or so music tracks we had. My attention was directed at all  the sound effects which I created using edits of audio from freesound.org and my personal collection of sound samples. Originally I had an array of ten perspective glitch samples and eight extrusion glitch samples but the extrusion sounds never made it to the final game. I also composed the high pitched glitch shriek for the falling intro sequence but produced this after I had already made my asset montage so it did not feature. This isn't necessarily a bad thing either as it is harsh on the ears.

Together with Reece I designed the GUI for the pause menu and produced the tutorial screen seen at the game’s beginning. The original idea was to have an animated PNG for each button which would glitch out but fix itself when the player moved their mouse over the button. I created the frames in Photoshop and rendered them out as a GIF from Premiere but unfortunately we ran out of time to get the code to accept them so we had to settle on having the buttons flick between two images; glitched and stable.

During the last few days before the submission I found myself playtesting our game every time Adrian and James made a change. Out of familiarity with our content I made both the trailer and walkthrough for EOF. As I worked on the trailer I tried pairing the footage we had with the different soundtracks Chris and I produced. Unfortunately the pacing was too constant for all of them so I reverted back to the original song Adrian had used in his teaser trailer in his initial pitch of EOF (”11” by InSpectr). I decided to leave the walkthrough silent considering all our puzzles are visual based and it is far easier to just show the solution than talk about it.

Where to from here:
I believe EOF has excellent potential for further development beyond what we managed in the time we had. Given an extra couple of months I believe we could develop a version of EOF to play on the oculus rift. We would also have time to bang out the bugs that we ran out of time to fix as well as produce more of the puzzles we had originally conceptualised. Adrian mentioned rebuilding the game from scratch in Unreal 4. Despite being able to hang onto our Maya assets I would use the opportunity to review and refine what we have. We could argue that EOF is designed for the oculus rift or at least would provide a unique experience for it so I would gladly put in the effort to create an adaptation.

Some of the things I would change would be to have more coherency in the colours selected for different level e.g. for each level stemming from Hub level 2 would have a background that is a pastel shade of purple with violet highlights on doodads. I would like to try something similar with the shapes that we use. Imagine a series of extrusion based puzzles where the environment is mathematically precise squares followed by a series of perspective bridge and ramp puzzles where the environments are incredibly angular. I would like to improve the quality of the music I produced as well as creating new tracks for different atmospheres. For the sound effects I would like to create more original sound effects to gradually replace the open source ones.

Conclusion:
End of File has been an excellent experience. The team was easy to work with and we were highly productive as a unit. I can appreciate the importance of playtesting now as it was our go to method for debugging and polishing. End of File is a game I can honestly say I am proud to have helped develop.