Long Hoang

Dreamshaper

Dreamshaper is a 2.5D puzzle platforming game, made using Unity3D in a team of two in 48 hours, as part of the RIT Game Dev Club's Pajama Jam, with the theme "Dream." In this game, the player must utilize their ability to controls objects in their dream to make their way to then end of the dream and wake up. The player can manipulate the size, move some objects, as well as changing the direction of gravity on themselves. The combination of these mechanics helped create some interesting levels where they must utilize all three power to make it to the goal.

I mostly worked on the movement system, as well as implementing most of the main mechanics like manipulate object size and gravity. I also polished the game a bit at the end by adding some simple animations using Unity's AnimationCurve and Coroutine, as well as adding sound effects and post processing. Due to time constraints. my teammate was only able to work on the "moving objects" mechanic, gave me feedbacks on some of the design choices I made, and designed most of the levels.

I learnt a lot from this project, mostly on the polishing side. The most significant of them is using AnimationCurve and Coroutines to make simple animations, which I'm in the process of adding to my newer projects. Moreover, I also got to tried making animations using Timeline on Unity.

The biggest problem I encountered is to make the "shifting gravity" mechanic compatible with other parts of the game. Implementing it is as simple as adding force in different directions using the Rigidbody components. I only added the gravity shifting mechanic after adding movement and some player animations. This cause some small issues with those previous features based on the current orientation of the player avatar. But there was also some game breaking problems like the player being able to jump infinitely when the gravity is pointing in the two sides, instead of up or down. It took a lot of time for me to revised old codes because the new mechanic weren't accounted for when I was programming them, as well as them not being robust enough.

Credits:

Link Dreamshaper gravity shifting mechanic