Digezz Gameplay Showcase

Hello! My name is Sami Uski, I’m an exchange student from Finland, majoring in Game Production and here is my contribution to the Digezz platform as part of Convergent Production (Digezz) course, in the form of a simple gameplay showcase.

First things first! You don’t have to install or download anything here, you can experience the showcase entirely through your web browser as long as it’s somewhat modern. The showcase is hosted at Unity Play, which is a hosting platform for WebGL games, which this showcase is.

This showcase is designed to be played mainly with keyboard. Only thing you can do with mouse is to click the «Click here!» button, which will open the help UI, which will tell you how to play the game.

Clicking the link below, will take you to the Unity Play page of this showcase. After that just click on play and the gameplay showcase will start.

https://play.unity.com/en/games/fa912c30-c444-4145-8f20-9d88ae4512de/digezz-gameplay-showcase

Initial idea and concept:

At the beginning, the initial idea was for the player to be able to experience a day in a life of a fantasy adventurer. This meant creating a system, which would track days, and in each day there would be a quest, that the player would have to complete.

This quest could be slaying a monster, looking for someone or helping someone in the game world and after completing this task, in the form of a quest, the day would be finished and the player would go back to their home to sleep, and then wake up for the next day and next quest. This would create a simple gameplay loop of sequence of events, which would be relatively easy to create content around.

I ended up going with «slaying a monster» task. Since it was relatively simple to implement and I could work on the stuff that I enjoy working, which was the AI and gameplay systems.

The setting would be a standard stereotypical fantasy world, where there are adventurers and monsters, where adventurers are kind of hired hands or mercenaries for taking care all kinds of things. From taking care of monsters, exploring unknown places and… Basically anything you can image as long as the reward is right.

About the project itself:

When I started planning out this project, my main goal was to create a simple 2D Top-Down Action video game showcase (Vertical Slice) for my portfolio, showcasing various mechanics and functionalities that people expect from video games of this type. I also wanted to implemented those mechanics and functionalities in a modular way, which means that I create the systems in way, that it takes very little time to modify them and to use systems again in other projects.

So as an example: This showcase has interactions which show, when interacted with, information to the player about a point of interest, either through neutral viewpoint, which describes the interest or as spoken by player character, which is through the player character.

This concept can be applied to many situations, not just this reading text, as is showcased by the fact that I also made the scene transitions interactions, which take player from one scene to another, with the same system that I used to show text to the player. This is also accompanied by fade in/fade out feature, which makes the screen go black, when we change levels to hide the fact, that I am changing the scene in the background.

There is also rudimentary combat system, where you have different skills you can choose to attack with and switch between them, along with the supporting player targeting and skill selection systems. Since the skills have cooldowns, (time it takes to use again, after the skill is activated) player is incentivized to switch between skills, as he is fighting an enemy, in order to deal as much damage as possible.

Why bother creating gameplay showcase like this?

First of all, I enjoy developing video games, it is the most satisfying outlet for my creative desires, right after video games, but most important reason of all: To show people that I have actually created something.

If I ever end up working for someone else and wanting to convince them that it’s a good idea to hire me, or trying to get people to work with me on my projects and convincing them that it’s not a waste of time, it’s a good idea to have some portfolio to back up your words and convince the person in question.

In Finland we have a very good saying, which when loosely translated goes somewhat like this: «Speak with your actions, not with your words…» It basically is a metaphor for the fact the words are cheap, and actions speak louder than words when it comes to convincing someone of something.

Creating things within video games, outside of modifications to known games, is not really a good way to convince people you have created something, unless the people who you are trying to convince, have done the same thing as you have. Although, there is a point to make with a fact that most people’s developer journey started from modding an already existing game, from which they moved to a new game engine and started creating things from scratch.

It is very, very important in video game industry to have a decent portfolio, when trying to get a job or trying to convince people to work with you on your projects. Nobody cares which school you come from, what you’ve learned there or what kind of genius developer you are, if they don’t know you and you don’t have anything to back up those words or knowledge with actual products or projects that the people you are dealing with can interact with.

Final words:

I guess that’s it! Thank you for reading, if you got this far.

If you want know what went wrong, or my thoughts about how I… managed during this project and what I realized at the end of it, go ahead read the Kritik section. It should be very interesting. I don’t know if you noticed it, but there is only one author for this project.

Hope you enjoyed the gameplay showcase even a little bit. It took me over 200 hours of work to do this, and I tracked every hour of my work on my workhour table excel. I learned a lot and… I think I’ll take a short break from game development for a while after this to… gather my thoughts.

(eli)