The Modus Room is a first-person puzzle game in which the player uses their mobile device to look and move around a room to examine and pick up objects in search for clues. When the players discovers a clues, they use the clues as solutions for the puzzles in order to find the key to the next rooms where more puzzles await.
Platform(Given): Mobile
Engine(Given): Unity
Theme(Given): Film-Noir, Totalitarian, Dystopian, Tyrannical (Kim Jong-Un)
Audience(Given): Inter-city youth
This time the process is not smooth as previous games. At first we tried to make a shooting game that the main character hold a gun walking on a dark street, and kill enemies who are selling guns and drugs and wanted to kill him. We even finished the core gameplay mechanic. But when the first pitch we got advice from others that since our audience is inner city youth - teenagers without educated and easily attracted by violence and drugs - which may cause bad influence in the real world, we considered to change our main gameplay. We originally have two weeks, but then we have only one week - actually less than 5 days to finish The Modus Room.
My contribution to the project
In this project I perform as the only artist in our team. Yes it’s the same team as the previous game. My major contributin is the art works of the game. Specific aet works are showed as follow:
- UI including start screen background, buttons(some of them were not put in the final version due to the lack of time)
- The house, including the building and furnitures inside
- Trailer animation
- Also a character with animation for our first idea, but dropped
I also took part in our discussion on the two ideas we had, and voted for escape room the second time.
Different things to do next time
After three times of art work training, I’m now getting more and more familiar with art works in games. But I still need to improve a lot. I didn’t get professional art training, so sometimes lack the sense of combine colors, such as this time I finally found that I dark grey would look better than pure black. I think I have talked a lot with our teams this time, but I still need to communicate more next time.
Also about the idea change, members in the team should all think twice about whether the idea is feasible. We need to think critically about it next time, to avoid such things from happening again.
Things I learned from participating in this process
This time many things left me deep impression.
Positive lessons:
First thing is team running. We are the same team as the previous one, so we have known each other more. It seems that we communicate more free with each other this time. Also two of our programmers didn’t know unity very much last time, but they have got some idea about it this time, and that’s also why we can nearly finish the prototype in such a short time.
Second is our programmers’ hard work. They work very hard, and tried their best to finish the game in time. And they are very willing to communicate with the team.
Third is testing. This time the playable version came out more rapidly so we could see and test the game from time to time. I still have the test version installed on my phone.
Negative lessons:
First is that we are more aware about the importance of team stay together. We were late to choose the seats, so we had to saperate to different places. So every meeting seems so pracious. And during the day we are always surrounded by different teams with their meetings. It’s not good for team works. And I think we didn’t handle it very good.
Second is that we are sometimes late for class. We always wanted to start meeting when the class is on, but often not all of us arrived including me for some reasons, so we just postponed the meeting. So after the meeting we usually didn’t have enough time in class. Though we had done better than before, this was still a big problem.
Third is that we didn’t have enough game design thing. We didn’t get agreed on the same ideas for puzzles to put in the game. Though our producer uploaded a design doc for puzzles for reference, we changed a lot in the final game without discussion, and so many of my assets were not used. Well this is actually still the problem of communication. We need someone to maintain the level things and design the puzzles carefully.