2D Game Design: Before Dawn
Updated: Nov 12, 2024
Before Dawn is a 2D platform game developed by our team using the Godot engine. My contributions included designing sound effects, coding the dialogue system and randomising object positions, as well as leading the art direction.
Type
2D Game Design and Development
Year
2019
Skills
Game Design, Programming(GDScript, C++ and C#)
Softwares
Godot, Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator
Project Brief
For this 3-month collaborative project, we were tasked with creating an interactive media piece titled "Portrait" to depict a character. The goal was for users to interact with our project and guess the character’s identity. We had creative freedom to choose any form of interactive media, and our team decided to build an interactive game.
Concept
We chose to represent Santa Claus, inspired by the upcoming holiday season. The game is a house-exploration experience from Santa’s perspective, where users navigate through a 2D environment to uncover clues about his identity.
Development
Using the Godot Engine, we created a 2D house simulation game. This was our first venture into coding and game development, so we faced several challenges, particularly in programming. We overcame these difficulties through extensive peer feedback, which helped us improve user experience with small but crucial details, such as fine-tuning dialogues and player interactions. Numerous iterations and late nights went into refining the gameplay.
Reflection
This project was a rewarding introduction to game design, coding, and interactive storytelling, and I am proud of our team’s efforts and the final outcome.
Inspired art style and game direction
Reference to Unity 2D Game: Chopin
Initial ideas and prototype
House layout
House is semi decorated with Christmas elements
1st floor: entrance, corridor, living room, stairs and kitchen
2nd floor: locked parents room, dog, stairs, baby room
3rd floor: kids room (2 kids), study room, stairs to attic
attic: key location
Art style
Art style: 2D, dark cool tone to pretend it is a robbery game (robbers usually have a big sack like Santa)
Flashlight only shows the room that you are in.
Challenges to player
if suspicion meter exceeds, game over
dog- increasing suspicious meter
floor panels- increasing suspicious meter if walk on them fastly
packages x 2
locked doors x 2- keys
Task: (will be randomised for replay)
find key
find dog food- cookies (leaving milk and cookies out for Santa Claus)
find kids room
stare at kids
plant the package (Santa’s presents)
Leave the house (after complete tasks)
Dialogues
instruction- welcome text pops up when player enter the game
front door- remind player to not exit the house
dog- inform player how to stop the dog from attacking
cookie- as treats for dog
package- area to plant package
level 3- remind player to observe the house decorations
stare at kids
baby sleeping
escape the house when all tasks complete
fail scene
The dialogue system is a real challenge for me. A lot of signals had to be sent from one node to another across different scenes.
A 2D area is created to be triggered when player encounter it. Then another signal has to link to the dialogue box to let the dialogue box appears. After that, a child node has to be made so the characters would pop up one by one, individually. In additional, a extra signal need to be sent to tell the original dialogue box to hide a few seconds later(a timer) when the text stop printing. This complicated procedure has to repeat for 10 times for all dialogues to appear smoothly. SADLY…
Final Output
