Icarus
Unity
Team
3 Weeks
Contributions
Gameplay
UI
Scripting
Icarus is a narrative-driven puzzle game featuring zero-gravity movement set in a space station rapid falling apart. You, as the player, must save the space station by navigating through its tight corridors. By jumping from wall-to-wall, ramp-to-ramp, or by slinging yourself across with a grappling hook!
This short game is a narrative experience and as such has a lot of sequence scripting involved to create a sense of progression.
Gameplay
Regarding gameplay, I was tasked with the zero-gravity movement: fast movement when near surfaces, or jump off a wall. Aside from that, I was also involved with the grappling hook, the game’s win and loss conditions, game progression (quests and items), and some environmental code.
User Interface
Our game’s UI was meant to appear as part of a visor’s display. I created an and on-screen objective tracker as well though the hints only appear when asked for.
To reduce the difficulty of a portion of the game without compromising the level itself, I even integrated the grappling hook with the UI to showcase to unsafe items.
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Narrative Scripting
The heavily scripted nature of the game would have forced me to manually create many interactions and triggers through code. To avoid that I developed a small visual scripting system, though I didn’t know about node-based scripting at the time, based around Unity’s components as building blocks called Actions that could be drag-and-dropped to insert certain types of functionality. This system mostly operated around being triggered by something else such as a volume or interaction.
While in the end, I was the only one using the system, I did find the idea of it enticing. Thinking back now, I could have easily achieved what I had in mind with Unity’s Scriptable Objects (reusable data containers that can be saved as separate assets).
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