Employee Of The Month

Released (29/05/20)

This was my first team project that I had ever created and was early on in my education of games design at college. This game is a single player first person stealth comedy game in where the player has to steal all of their co-workers supplies.

ITCH.IO PAGE

The Project:

This project was the first team project I had ever participated in and it was also my first big attempt at coding a game. I found the experience difficult and since I was new to coding the code was bad, however this game was an invaluable experience for me due to the difficulties and hurdles me and the team had to overcome. I felt myself in a leadership role for the first time due to a lack of direction and understanding and this was scary and yet fun it sparked my interest into guiding and programming both simultaneously.

During one of my modules at university I spent time testing, gathering data, improving and iterating on the project and trying to make the experience more fun and enjoyable for players.

Iterations and Changes video:

Appologies for the speed and cutting of the video the submission had to under 5 minutes and I was not able to include all the content I wanted to.

Data Collection Types:

Original Version (Before Iteration):

'Butter Fingers' Issue

This is the 'Butter Fingers' issue, a term given to the bug by the developers. The bug was initially a design choice within the game but inevitably was perceived as annoying. It was caused by the raycast no longer hitting the collider of the picked up game object causing an immediate drop of the item.

Non Respawning items

A clip showing how items will not respawn if they glitch out of the map.

A video clip showing game play of the original game version

Gameplay shows various aspects such as, the original knockout mechanic, dropping items last second etc.

Improved version (After Changes):

'Butter Fingers' Improvement

Improvement shown to the butter fingers issue. The improvement made adds a timer that starts counting down when the held object is not hit by the raycast, this countdown resets when the raycast hits the object again. This means that the object will not instantly drop when not hit by the raycast.

Knockout Iteration

Changes to the way Knockout worked. To make it easier for players a face and countdown Timer was added so that the player could accurately know when enemies would stand back up and who was unconscious/Conscious.

Changes for dropping Items Last second

These changes were made due to players being able to drop items at the last second and not be caught, it was a change that meant you had to plan ahead instead of being able to avoid being caught easily.

Respawning items

A change made to the game to fix bugs where items would fall out of the map in some cases. This fix spawned the item on the player when it hit a collider that was positioned at the map boundary.

Detection Indicator change

An addition of a detection indicator to show when enemies are nearby the player. A design choice made as players were being often caught from behind by enemies.

Knockout Timer:

Knockout Timer

This image shows the setup of the knockout timer script in the awake function, In this function it sets up the knockout timers to work in conjunction with the start of the game. In this image the Knockout Timer method handles the UI and displays the currently unconscious enemy's.

Individual Knockout Timer

This script handles the times for the individual unconscious enemy and handles the UI display of the time.

Detection Indicator:

Detection Indicator

This script sets up and makes the detection indicator function correctly, it creates, assigns the enemy and handles the functionality of the mechanic.

Indicator Register

Registers/creates the indicator from the Detection Indicator script.

Indicator Check

Calls upon the Indicator register to create an indicator when the raycast hits the enemy collider.

'Butter fingers' Fix, Drop Timer & Item Respawn:

Butter Fingers & Drop Timer

This image showcases the Butter Fingers and Drop timer within the pickup and hold script, the script is responsible for handling the holding of objects in front of the player. The Butter Fingers fix adds a timer that activates when the raycast cant see the item, if the raycast still cant see the item after the timer, the held object var is set to null. The drop timer basically starts counting when the player drops an item, after the countdown has finished the boolean that the enemys check for to see if they can catch the player is set to false.

Item Respawn

This image shows the Item respawn script which simply is applied to a cube below the map and when an object hits it, it spawns the object on the player.