Team Project: Group of 5
Produced Spring 2021 with a 3 month timeframe
Game Link : https://derek-sturm.itch.io/throughthewinter
Through the Winter was a game built for the 2021 Advanced Media Entertainment Society’s state showcase. An organization that encourages game development throughout high schools in Washington state.
The theme for this competition was “Perseverance”
Project Roles:
Lead Systems Designer
UI Design / Programming
Lighting Technician
1st Place Winner of the AMES 2021 State Showcase
Day and Night Cycle
In Through the Winter the time of day is the driving force of the player’s actions. They must collect a certain number of berries before nightfall or their tribe of racoons will face extinction.
For this game’s UI I wanted to create a natural feeling circular design that displayed to players the time of day and the important events that would take place throughout it.
The day and night cycle length can be changed dynamically to finely tune the pacing of gameplay.
Additionally the UIController script also activates certain events based on the time of day, such as removing berries or displaying a tutorial message the first time the player experiences dusk.
Short Explanation:
A day and night cycle pushes the player to always be moving
Timing can be changed by the designer
The time is represented with a value with can trigger certain effects
Dynamic 2D Lighting
Also being displayed above is an example of dynamic lighting in 2D Unity.
During this time, 2D lighting in Unity was practically unheard of and took quite a bit of setup to get it working correctly. However, I was able to build off of the knowledge I gained while working on Venator Inmortuae.
Having the light change colors throughout the day was essential in creating player immersion.
The LightsController script takes information from the UIController script about the time of day in order to correctly change the main light’s direction and smoothly transition between different lighting colors established for day, night, dusk, and dawn.
Short Explanation:
Project had to be set up specifically to use lighting in Unity when it was an experimental feature
Changing the lighting took information from the time value in order to change direction and color