[Team 45] A32 and the 8 Pages

Inspiration

Jamie Twycross's amazing heartwarming coursework 2 for the Programming and Algorithms coursework challenged us to shift our thinking when facing problems and getting stuck. He also taught us to expand our knowledge and stay curious by trying new libraries on a short deadline. But most importantly, he emphasised the importance of completing work early in the event that github goes down. So this game was truly a love letter to the life lessons he's given us in the short time he's taught us so far.

What it does

A32 and the 8 Pages is a 'Slender Man: 8 Pages' inspired survival horror game. The player's aim is to survive and avoid encounters with Jamie Twycross while collecting the 8 lost notes of their classmate scattered across A32, B52, and the surrounding Jubilee forest. The more notes the player has found, the more frequent Jamie will appear, thus increasing the difficulty as the game goes on.

How we built it

We divvied the tasks up according to strengths so those who know the basics of game development focused on the code (making shaders, player character, and the Slender Man movements) while those of us with less familiarity focused on understanding the basics of Godot, making the environment and level building.

Challenges we ran into

The two main challenges we had were leaning how to use Godot and Git. Most of us have never worked with Godot, or made a game in general, so we had to learn quickly and strategise by working to each person's strengths. While half of us were working on the main map for the gameplay, the other half was working on the player and enemy movement simultaneously for more efficiency when creating the project. All of us did everything in Godot and Blender. After all of us finished the parts we were working on, we went on to merge all 4 projects to create the main singular game we were aiming to create. However, once we got it merged, there were also numerous issues to trouble shoot, the biggest being that the player interaction with the pages that allows them to pick it up, stopped working after the merge. Thus we had to fix this functionality in the last few minutes. But with support from each other and ensuring good communication, we managed to overcome these hurdles.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making a 3D game while under time pressure and most of us never having used Godot/game development tools before was a huge accomplishment for us. Individually, we also learned a lot about specific aspects of Godot since we each specialised in a specific part of the process and brought it together to make an amazing product when merged (which was also an accomplishment itself with the amount of trouble shooting that we did) despite the short time period given to code and learn the software.

What we learned

We learned about the yellow tapes in gaming as we considered how to lay out the map and how Slender Man interacts with the player. In learning Godot's mesh tools, we learned how to balance between making our own constructs and when to save time by importing creative commons assets. Since although importing saves time, making the meshes ourselves allows for more flexibility with the code, like adding wind or particle effects. Towards the end, we also realised it would be easier to use Godot in conjunction with other tools such as Blender to make compound meshes then import it in. In terms of coding, we learned about implementing shaders that use variables and how to change those variable with GDScript. This was one of the biggest aspects we learned about since we had no idea how 2D canvas shaders or 3D shaders worked.

What's next for A32 and the 8 Pages

"Coursework 3 and the 8 Pages" — assuming we pass coursework 3 of course.

Built With

• blender
• gdscript
• godot