Witch Space

Witch Space was a project I worked on for the Search For a Star competition that took place from December 2020 to January 2021. It was a game jam with the goal of developing a game based around a specific feature provided to us within a already created Unity project. This feature was a sort of dialogue system that could output text and allow the player to pick choices to advance a conversation.

Having never worked with a dialogue system before, my main idea was to go for something story-driven. Most games I had played with a dialogue system were heavily story based so this felt like the best idea at the time.

To be honest, I actually disliked this project a lot and never ended up submitting it cause I felt embarrassed by how bad I thought it was. Looking at it again after many months, I do not believe it was actually as bad as I thought. Still could of used some polish, but definitely not horrible!

Design

At the time, I was incredibly excited for the upcoming Elite Dangerous expansion: Odyssey. I thought of creating something space related and eventually came up with the idea that you would be stranded on a broken ship with the objective to fix your ship through a series of puzzles.

The puzzles were meant to be incredibly simple for the scope of the game. The majority of the content came from the conversations you would have with your AI companion who would act as a sort of guide to help you understand what you need to do next. Though even without your AI friend, the game was incredibly straight forward.

The puzzles ranged from collecting a certain keycode to turning off a collection of buttons. Incredibly simple puzzles. I wish I could have implemented some which were more complex but due to the time crunch, I was unable too.

Programming

In terms of programming, there wasn’t a massive amount to comment on as the main dialog system was already completed for us. A lot portion of the code I implemented involved ensuring certain buttons and puzzles would open doors and continue the story. Majority of these were done through Unity Events.

One cool thing I did for this project was implement a shader that would highlight buttons when hovering over them. Unfortunately, this shader caused a few issues when it came to building the game and due to the limited time I had left, I was unable to fix the issues in time so the shader had to be removed. As of now, the only shader in use within the game is the transparent hologram shader used by your AI companion when they talk to you.