My second "Advanced Game Design & Technology" group project. A story based puzzle game about facing your traumas.
Halfway through the project we switched our game engine from Unity to Godot.
Adventure, Puzzle
Singleplayer
Gameplay/systems programmer
Game designer
Trailer director
PC
7 people
Unity, C#, Godot, GDScript, Trello, Google Drive, Codecks, Git
Project ranged from February 2024 -> July 2024 (~5 months)
You wake up in an unfamiliar world with no recollection of your past or who you are. In order to get out, you must first face your traumas.
"Shattered Echoes" is a story driven puzzle game about facing your traumas. You're in a coma, trapped by traumatic experiences from your past. In order to wake up, you need to traverse an unfamiliar world and seek out the very things holding you back. Along the way you'll find spirit companions that help you throughout your journey.
You're stuck in a coma with no desire to wake up, choosing instead to create a dream world for yourself. In order to return to reality, you must face your traumas and deal with them.
Some challenges you can't face alone. To help you along your journey, you'll be accompanied by various spirit animals! Each has a different ability that helps you get through the levels in their own way.
Every level has puzzles that, when solved, get you closer to facing a traumatic event. Your spirit companions help you reach these points, or solve them.
This can range from getting a companion to reach a place for you, to collecting puzzle pieces and aligning them together.
My primary contribution in this project was through direct development. This included designing and programming systems in a modular way. My work was divided between actual features and systems to support existing & future features.
My main contributions were:
Flag-based state management
Constellation map puzzle
Transformation into spirit animals
Interaction system
Halfway through development we had to present the game to a group of professionals. To present our game we, among other things, needed a trailer. The result can be seen at the top of this page.
I mostly worked on the following:
Direction
(Rough) storyboarding
Filming
Editing
Together with the group I worked on the general design. The project included a lot of learning opportunities like "How do you tell a story through a game?" or "How does (x) help tell (y) of the story?".
In broad strokes, this is what I helped design:
Story
Game concept
Spirit companions
Game systems