UI Navigation Game
One of the more prominent genres in gaming in the puzzle game. It's one of the few genres that lets the player think through their actions, and figure out how to proceed with the game. The puzzle genre itself has taken on many iterations over it's lifetime, from navigation and deciphering codes in Myst, to bringing objects to a goal in Portal. I decided to prototype that focused on the former category of puzzle games; specifically focusing on file navigation and riddle solving.
I worked on this project in Unity's 2D engine. This is mostly because what was required wasn't so extensive that it needed the 3D engine. In fact, aside from a few scripts, the entire game was done with UI. The main aspect of development I wanted to focus on was UI, and how it interacts with each other in a given scenario.
The idea came about while I was working on another project called Planetary Planter. My prime role on that game was UI programmer; as such, I worked with a lot of menus, and connected them in order to accomplish certain things. At some point during development, I thought about what it would be like to use these UI elements to make a puzzle game. With that, I was thinking of ideas that could make the experience more interesting, and riddles came to mind. As such, the concept and prototype of the game were born.
Unlike most projects I've worked on, this one was relatively straight-forwards in it's approach. The largest hurdle for me would probably figuring out how text input worked in Unity. I've done text inputs in Visual Studio C++, so the logic remained the same, just in a different format. Fortunately, it didn't take very long to figure out how it worked.
While working on this project, I found myself really enjoying it. Since the main focus is more in-line with what I'm specialized in, I found it to be more fun than many of the previous works I've done. Since this is a prototype, I'm looking forward to expanding upon it, with deeper and more nuanced mechanics, as well as a potential story to go along with it. One thought that came to me was to turn this into some sort of ARG. All of these are definite improvements upon the prototype's foundation, and I'm excited to see where it goes next.