AVINASH PRABHU'S PORTFOLIO
PROJECT DETAILS
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Reflective Nightmare is doom like first person shooter with indirect narrative.
This game consists of 3 levels and 1 interactable intro cutscene. The goal in each level is two destroy all enemies using the guns given to the player in each level. After all the enemies are destroyed a glowing door appears, when the player goes inside the glowing door they are automatically transported to the next level and this continues for all three levels.
This project taught me a lot about making enemy AI, implementing pathfinding, making scalable and reusable systems using composition and inheritance, and I also learnt a lot about project scope management
PROJECT STATUS
SOFTWARE USED
PROJECT TYPE
TEAM SIZE
LANGUAGE USED
PRIMARY ROLE
SECONDARY ROLES
COLLEGE, YEAR 2, STUDIO 3 UNIT
COMPLETED & PUBLISHED
UNITY 3D & BLENDER 3D
C#
DESIGNER & 3D MODELLER
PROGRAMMER & PROJECT LEAD
2 PROGRAMMERS, 1 DESIGNER
Personally the gun shooting implementation in this game is the highlight for me in this project. The reason is because this gun script is highly customisable. With this script alone I can make almost any type of gun imaginable, from this script I can make guns like shotgun assault rifles, pistols, burst rifles, sniper guns, submachine guns etc.
I also did the animation for the pistol, and the second shot gun, Personally i really like how the pistol animation came out it has the perfect weight impact when you shoot.
As you can see from this picture below there are a lot of settings that can be configured for example, I can configure the bullet speed, the bullets spread, whether I want this to be in automatic gun, whether I want to manually reload or automatically reload or whether do I want to shoot multiple bullets for per shot etc.
There are others affects that can also be configured such as the gun crosshair muzzle flash, the bullet impact and Bullet impact particle effects and sounds can also be configured.
One thing that I wish that could be added to this script would be to configure the gun offset when the player equips the gun. Currently there is a separate script that does it, that is attached to the player controller. As to change the gun offset I need to go to the player prefab to modify it.
GUN SHOOTING IMPLEMENTATION
When we were initially planning to make a narrative driven game we were really put off on the concept of making non interactable cut scenes. Since we were also a small team who also had no knowledge of how to make proper good looking cut scenes we decided to do a linear interactive sequence instead using collision triggers, delay triggers and Unity events.
Our team had a lot of issues with the designer, so I decided to take the responsibility to make the intro of the game and my initial thought was to not make one script and control the whole sequence. Instead I thought it would be easier to have helper scripts such as after certain delay
trigger another sequence of events, on collision trigger another event etc. I would then use these mini helper sequence scripts and connect each individual sequence manually using unity events. I initially thought that this would be more configurable and customisable. Later on I realized that this is extremely customisable but very difficult to organize, as you can see from the unity hierarchy image below, it gets pretty complicated to read and understand as the number of sequences and events grow.
As you can see from the two images below one of the images shows that the scene is filled with different collision triggers, each collision Trigger runs a specific sequence of events. The order of these events can be seen in the unity hierarchy image
The design of this intro was also my initial Idea, since we were trying to play with the concept of a person digging through their past memories, I thought it would be good to have a slow burn minimal intro that ramps up over time. As you can see from the video there are not many sounds being played in the intro neither are there two many assets or visual things happening. The only visual aspects present are spotlights and heavy post processing. what makes the intro also very effective is the voice acting which was done by Dev, who is one of my team members, he did a really good job of impersonating a therapist
INTERACTABLE INTRO CUTSCENE DESIGN
WATCH WITH HEADPHONES
ENEMY MODEL DESIGN AND EFFECTS
Me and Dev Wanted the Enemies to look abstract and not realistic. To achieve this look, I took heavy inspiration from the game super hot where the enemies are abstract and look crystallized so I replicated something similar for reflective Nightmare as well.
I also made destructible versions of each model and made a destroy animation for each of them that plays when an enemy gets destroyed by the player.
In reflective nightmare as you clear each level, the clarity and detail of each level increases and level 3 was supposed to be the final level with the most detail at the same point in the narrative point of view for our game level 3 is supposed to show that the person going through their past memories is going insane, and this insanity aspect was supposed to be shown in the level.
So I made each prop and asset in this level have a higher poly count and detailed textures. The space of the environment was also bigger. The whole structure was also more realistic to resemble more of a warehouse. To show this insanity aspect, in the ceiling of the level the pipes, the spotlight from above they move in this rigid abstract way. the insanity aspect can also be seen in the enemies and sound with the Neon abstract glowing faces on the enemies faces and the multiple warehouse ambience effects.
For the ending of Level 3 we want to show as if this person in the game killed a person from the past. Due to time constraints I were not able to show this in the most efficient way, instead I went for a more abstract way of showing it using post processing effects , sound effects and an abstract model, so it's more of a final clue that needs to be decoded
LEVEL 3 DESIGN IMPLEMENTATION
The melee enemy uses steering behavior to move. I have also incorporated path finding along with the steering behavior so the enemy exactly knows where to go and target the player.
MELEE ENEMY
The ranged enemy uses a finite state machine for it to work. There is a script that handles all the transitions, there are also other behavior based scripts that do the actual behavior itself This enemy also incorporates pathfinding to target and move to the player accurately
The behaviors that the range enemy supports are wandering, chasing and shooting. All the behavior transitions are based on player distance. If the player is too far Away it will wander if the player is a bit near it will chase the player, if the player is very close it will shoot the player
RANGED ENEMY
A* PATHFINDING
GENERIC BAR BASED SCRIPT
From this base generic visual bar script alone I was able to make two custom scripts inheriting from it one was an Ammo bar and the other was a health bar. My thought process was that almost every bar based UI has a current value, Max value and in a lot of cases you want to dynamically change the color of the UI based on the value as well. So I put all of those common functionalities into one generic script that I can use to make custom UI bar based scripts
HEALTH BAR 7 AMMO BAR
The health bar works just the way you expect it to,if the enemy collides with the player the UI bar updates as well as the color.
For the ammo bar based on the gun equipped it will update the ammo count and bar accordingly. The icon will also update based on the gun equipped
