Binary Dreams
August 2020 - December 2020
Binary Dreams is a 2D platformer developed solo in Unity as my senior Game Design capstone project. The game features 4 distinct environments for the player to run and jump through with an assortment of interesting characters to meet.
What Went Well
I am incredibly happy with the game itself. I think it’s the best game I’ve made at DigiPen so far, and I have many different specialties that I can show off within it. I had some decent narrative documentation to go along with it too and learned a ton about implementing a story.
My dialogue system went through some massive improvements from where it was at the beginning of the semester. I had brought it over from my GAT315 project, and I am very proud of how far it came. I got XML parsing in, text effects, interchangeable dialogue boxes, text coloring, inline-images, and audio!
I am very happy with how my UI turned out. My personal favorites were the notifications that appear when you pick up a cosmetic, and the customization UI (this one is more from a tech perspective). I was able to generate a button for each cosmetic the player had unlocked and arrange them in an easy-to-read way and integrate it with a unity scrollbar using math.
What Went Wrong
I waited way too long into development to figure out the narrative and ended up over scoping it. If it weren’t for that I probably would have specialized in narrative.
There were some points of polish that I never got to, mainly centered around the levels. I find that level design is something that I’m much slower at, so I just couldn’t find the time to make the Barren City and Heaven more interesting, let alone create the other areas I originally wanted for my story.
Loading the game was very buggy, which was not ideal. For all the moving parts there were, changing between scenes didn’t cause very many issues.
Lessons I Will Apply in Future Projects
It’s taken this long, but I have seen the value of documenting early, even in a solo project. At the end, when I made mind maps for my dialogue system, I felt like that would be an incredibly useful way to plan and document complex systems. Going into my final semester of GAM, and last project at DigiPen, I’m going to try to do a much better job of planning the game upfront (a lot of this stems from my GAM375 postmortem as well). The investment design class I took this semester as well taught me a much better way of documenting systems and progression loops, which would have been incredibly helpful at the start of this project. I got so focused on implementing things, that I struggled to really integrate them into the overall game loop. I think that if I had just spent a few hours diagramming my cosmetic system and the unlocks upfront, I would have saved a ton of time and made a more enjoyable experience.
I made a spreadsheet to map out all dialogue in the game, including things like what triggers it, player text options in response, and what those options will trigger.
Mind Maps I Made (Technical Design)
