This is a short demo of an adventure game I created where you explore a facility, trying to find an exit only to slowly reach the depths of its secrets. It covers the first of three areas within this facility. I believe I did a good job with the level and puzzle design that lends well to the player exploring and paying attention to the, albeit small, environment.

The main focus for me in this project was to practice my skills and learn to use Godot. This was quite a success as I improved all my skills, learnt how to better use my workflow, and understand Godot to a much better degree than before. In fact, I really love Godot after this. The scene manipulation and differences in creation with other engines I have used feel weirdly more intuitive, and I will definitely be using it in future.

As I said just earlier, I am very proud of my level and puzzle design in this demo. The first room is a good example of this. Immediately, the player is placed between pits filled with varying levels of water that have an aura or radiation throbbing out of them at different opacities. Trying to go to the left, with more visible throbs and less water, results in their death very quickly. The right is much safer with little throbbing visible, but the second pit has a broken bridge requiring them to go in it, also dying. By entering the door, the levels of the water can be changed (where more water = less radiation damage) with a limitation causing water to transfer to the right-most pit automatically, requiring a key found via exploration to the left. This is good at showing the player that solutions to different puzzles may require them to go multiple rooms away right off the bat.

This is just one part of what I accomplished here with more exploration providing more keys, a radiation suit, and keycodes for exploration, but also some minor worldbuilding which gives a small glimpse into what this facility is and why it seems sinister whilst being so “clean”. I was also only able to flesh out this first stage, as although I had plans for two more stages, time did not permit as I started to better understand my workflow and prioritised learning asset production.

This was actually the first time I properly went ahead and made assets for a game myself, so I had a lot of fun learning here. My inexperience shows with relatively rudimentary compositions and basic animations, however I am quite proud of what I made here and look forward to progressing my skills in future studies and projects. The animations I made were particularly fun and turned out much better than I expected. With feedback and assistance from friends, I made all of these assets much better than I would have alone. For sprites and backgrounds, they helped with “little” things I often forgot like shadows and perspective which made massive differences in quality. For animations, they helped with assistance on basics like squash and stretch (this made my death animations leagues better) and to use them for effects (the radiation throbbing).

However, why not at least mention my cool ideas for these other areas. I mean, you’ve read this far, you gotta be at least a lil’ interested. Anyway, the second stage would require the player to descend down the elevator shaft, however, the elevator itself is still not working and requires them to go down the sides using rope. This reveals a cave system full of discarded materials that can be used to get further down. At one point, the verticality of the area comes in to play more with the player needing to destroy the ceiling of one area to get rope that is otherwise inaccessible.

The final area is gotten to when the floor of the end of the cave system collapses. Here, it is very similar to the first area, but in more disrepair due to the cave system leaking down on it. This was going to have my favourite idea for a mechanic. In order to get into the main elevator room to find the troubles, you need to unlock a door. However, this can only be done by hacking a computer to reverse the safety protocols making them open (rather than close) when it detects too much radiation. This also requires the player to get a big piece of radioactive material to this door. The piece that would do this is too strong and would kill the player too fast, so they would need a different radiation suit. This suit is very bulky though, so they cannot jump, which requires them to find ways to manipulate the environment to create a path. This area would also contain the only other person in the game, although they are dead. They were the person managing the materials being stored in this deep storage and were left to rot.

I wasn’t able to fit in the story ideas I had for the game, as they would be properly explored in these final two areas. Over the game, the construction of the facility would be shown to be more focused on those in charge making money rather than the safe storage of the material. This is more willful negligence than direct evil which I find to be a very interesting concept to explore. This negligence not only resulted in injuries and dangers to the environment, but drove those in charge to further lengths including eliminating whistleblowers. Then, it flowed over, past the time of construction, leading to the slow destruction of a post-apocalyptic community just trying to survive. In the end, the plan was to have the player finally get into to main elevator room only for it to be full of extremely large amounts of radioactive material leaking into the groundwater and killing the player extremely quickly. The sins of the past will be in effect far into the future, and those that commit them rarely ever experience the consequences themselves.