It’s been a good few months since I left university, I would have left slightly later but because of COVID-19, my university life ended a few months early and we went to online lectures for a while, but regardless, one thing we still had to complete was our dissertations.
To explain what the dissertation is, it’s usually a report around 10,000 words long. The report can be on whatever you want. My dissertation was this 10,000-word report, plus making a video game to go along with it. (since my course was Game Development, it made sense)
There is a lot I can say on the report, like how it was designed for the software engineering course or how a lot of it was unexplained and left up to your supervisor’s (the person marking it) interpretation.
But, all that aside, let’s focus on the interesting part. The video game. Since the video game is important (and the report is based on the game), you’d think the supervisors would at least play the game, and you’d be wrong to think that. They are probably ‘too busy’ to play all the dissertation projects of their 5 or so students, plus all their other commitments.
I won’t deny that I’m salty about it, but I’ll say it again, let’s just focus on the game.
I’ll try and throw in some screenshots of the game throughout when I can.
So, what was my game?
Well, it was originally meant to be a horror game that focused on a large open world. It took inspiration from games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as well as Yomawari: Night alone. Although it wouldn’t be as detailed and as amazing as Breath of the Wild, or as unique and creative as Yomawari, I wanted to at least try.
I started development pretty quickly and was always super excited to work on it. I had planned out so much, from the monsters you encounter to the cool programming systems that would need to be implemented. However, it quickly changed from my original idea. It became less horror and more RPG. To account for this, I added dialogue and started to build a story.
I made the decision to change to an RPG very quickly but still wanted to keep the dark and eerie atmosphere along with all the creatures I created.
So, I created a little story. You play as a young girl whose parents are away for the night. You are left along with your phone and a few books to read, after reading one of the books, you get a mysterious message from an unknown number, telling you to go and meet them at the top of the shrine whilst ignoring all the other spirits outside.
The player can leave the house and explore the town, they have to make their way to the shrine at the top of a mountain where they meet two twins. These twins explain that they are guardian’s of the shrine and that they need help freeing all the other spirits. You can only agree and are forced to help them. They guide you along the way.
Each spirit has its own way of helping them (they aren’t all unique) I think there were something like 6 spirits (8 if you include the twins).
Once you complete the first 5, you get told that the 6th one is trouble, and will kill you if you aren’t careful.
Once you free the spirits, the twins are also free, that’s the basics of the story.
Nothing too special.
Now, I want to show off some stuff for fun. Here is a screenshot of the pages from the book of spirits that the player reads at the start. I was really happy with these. I remember spending one night just blasting loud music through my headphones whilst making them. It was a lot of fun. Times were simpler back then.
Here is a screenshot of the town above. I hid all the assets of the houses and roads and stuff. I would show a picture of it with all the houses and stuff but I needed this picture for the report and this was all I had.
It looks weird cause I had to make the world concealed somehow, and giant walls seemed like the way to go at the time. I did at one point want to change it so that it was a forest you couldn’t see the end of and there was an invisible wall, but I thought about doing that near the deadline.
Finally, let’s talk a bit about cut features.
There were plans to make it scarier. It was originally meant to be horror but that stopped because I was unable to ‘make it scary’. I’m just a programmer and wasn’t able to create scary assets or sounds, all I could use was whatever I could find for free.
One feature that I didn’t want to cut, but had to cut due to time constraints, was that you would get phone calls from one of the spirits. This spirit would just heavily breath down the phone and I thought it would be pretty creepy and really cool. Sadly, I cut it because I forgot about it, as it wasn’t my priority.
There was also plans to implement a heartbeat monitor that would change depending on what the player was looking at and hearing, sadly, I only implemented it going up on sound and not visual. The only reason I got the sound working was cause I implemented it really early on. I waited for the spirits to be done before working on the visual side but realised it would be a huge pain so I kept putting it off until I ran out of time.
To quickly hate on the dissertation a little bit. It was clear that the dissertation favoured games with reaplayability over long story driven games, this was made clear by how they only give you 5 minutes during a 20 minute presentation to show it off. It would have been nice to see the breakdown on how much the game actually counts towards the final grade. You could just make a crummy game in the last week and show that. Sure, you’d have to have the game relate to the report, but it’s definitely doable and possible to get a 70+ mark by doing so.
I think that’s it. I don’t think I have anything else to say.
I would like to put the game online, but due to not owning any of the assets and sounds, I think it’s best to keep it to myself. Don’t want to have to deal with any copyright problems.
I think I’ll attempt to remake it, or at least create the project to start remaking it with complete custom assets. I really liked the ideas I had for it and wish to implement them in something. I definitely could do better. I’ve improved a lot since I started that project and would love to try. I’ve even got more ideas that I thought of after I finished the project.
If anyone is interested in the final grade I got for the dissertation, I think I got 72 out of 100.
Thanks for reading. As usual, links to all my stuff is below.
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