Development Process

This game was developed as a walking sim assignment for my Core Studio Environments class. I started out wanting to make an experience that takes place within a maze, and when trying to figure out how to make it more than just a maze, I ended up developing a concept inspired by religion and faith. The ideas conveyed in this game are based on my own experiences with religion as well as observations I have made about family, friends, and strangers on the internet. Many religions, as far as I know, tend to be based around the promise of benefiting in the afterlife, whether that be through some form of heaven or reincarnation. But my personal understanding is that ultimately, there is no real way of knowing whether this promise will ever come to fruition. Yet many, many people still take comfort within religion and find meaning to their lives within it. I find this unwavering faith fascinating, and wanted to explore it in a game.

For this assignment we were meant to use assets found online, not make our own. This was a bit of a hurdle for me as I found it hard to find 3D assets that I felt matched what I was going for, as well as looked cohesive. What I ended up doing was only using one 3D asset, and altering it slightly in Blender to better fit what I was going for. I was worried this would make my game too plain, but after setting up sections I realized that the starkness of the environment actually suited the message well.

Initially my idea was to set up different hallway sections that would move around according to triggers, and this was still used in the first set of hallways to make it so that each of the halls lead to the same place. I originally expected coding to be the hardest part, however I soon realized that managing my variables and keeping track of the location of everything was actually harder. I needed to make sure that I could expect where one of two things would be in order to line them up with a stationary variable. Maybe I could have had something within the program check locations and used that in an equation to get a new variable to move to each time... but I don't trust my math skills enough to be sure that would have worked. Instead I opted to set both the current section and the next section to a certain area. 

This worked to begin with, however as I kept working an issue started popping up. When triggered, the area would move without the player in it, leaving them falling through space. This was confusing and frustrating as it hadn't done this in the same places previously, and I hadn't touched the code. Maybe some adjacent code had somehow affected it, but as I retraced what I had done I couldn't figure out what would have done that. I tried to combat the issue by making the player a child of whatever area it was in. However, though the code worked and the player was listed as a child to the area it was currently in, it still would not move along with the area. 

Eventually I decided to give up on this one mechanic and change my concept slightly. Instead of moving hallways, I would have it so that after the player reached a certain point they would be moved back to the start. I did this through animations flashing the player in and out of the scene, with an animation event that would reload the scene. Although it ended up being a lot simpler than my original concept, in a way I think I prefer how it ended up. It made it so that something "happened" and gave the player more to think about, more emotions to feel, than if they had just been wandering through endless hallways.

Ultimately, I'm proud of how this game ended up and what I achieved in it. I'm not a huge fan of 3D games or making them(motionsickness+me just being very bad at judging where things are in 3D spaces, I had to go back and fix so many gaps in the walls :')), but this has definitely skewed my perception of them to be more positive. It's not by any means perfect but I tried and learned a lot, and therefore think I did well within the constraints I was presented.