Description
A hand-painted 2D puzzle adventure game influenced by my experiences, emotions, and my acceptance of self growing up. Desolate is a personal story told over seven distinct acts with the story being told more through the world design and puzzles. In 2020 development on desolate was ended due to the pandemic.
All art, design, and programming was handled by me. With music from Ben Tolich.
Information
• Genre: Cinematic Platformer, Puzzle Adventure
• Platform: PC, Mac
• Engine: Unity
• Status: Unreleased
• Role: Game Designer & Developer
Highlights
• Successful Kickstarter campaign
• Showing the Game at BitSummit in Kyoto 2014
Feature Breakdown – Pathfinding
The characters movement went through several iterations throughout the development process. One of the bigger changes was to turn the game from platformer controls to point and click. This was done to simplify the games controls and put focused on the interactions over platforming challenges.
Making this change required updating all the levels and puzzles that were already completed and building a new tool to help with future levels.
In the end a simple tool was built that took in two points and laid out a curved path between them of walkable nodes. This allowed for specific paths looked like the player was platforming. Ladders, jumping points, and interactions could be set at each node to trigger different animations and gameplay.
However, in the later levels the screen wraps and deforms, the pathfinding needed to account for this. A modified version of A* was written to allow for the player to screen wrap or take modified paths that didn't rely on the distance between nodes.
