Virtual Recovery

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  Main Menu

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  Start Level

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  T-Joint Console Room

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  Gameplay with console file created

Inspiration

The inspiration of this project was a save and load system. The kind of system that allows a game to save a "save" file onto the player's computer got us thinking about how else we could add/delete files with the player's file explorer.

What it does

A story driven top down 2d game. The game uses your file explorer to hold/add/update the player's inventory, get hints to solve puzzles, and progress through the game's world with keycodes.

How we built it

We used Unity and C# File IO Libraries to implement our idea. For sprites and art we used Aseprite. All sound effects and music are from freesound.org, acquired with a CC0 license.

Challenges we ran into

From a design perspective, we struggled finding a good way to implement the file explorer as a key mechanic in our game as it could easily cause problems throughout, and was generally a pretty abstract way of playing a game. We also really struggled to save the "root directory" that the game added files to, across scenes (since the player sets this directory at the beginning of the game in the title screen menus).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the file structure to work in a way that was interesting and provided a bit of variety in the gameplay was definitely an accomplishment. Additionally, we're proud that we actually have an execution of our idea (although maybe not as feature full as first planned) to show for our time this weekend.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the event system and how useful it is for triggered events, as well as PlayerPrefs and their ease of use for persisting data. We also learned ways to brainstorm game ideas and scope managing.

What's next for Virtual Recovery

We'd like to improve on the story and build a more polished version. There are still a few ideas that we would like to explore (like puzzles where the player must figure out what type of file to make, and making more use of the text inside of the files as well as the name of the files). Currently the project is quite short but we'd like to explore the idea in more depth. We'd also like to find a way to interact/validate with the file structure so the player doesn't ruin the experience for themselves, but also gives them enough freedom to enjoy the unique mechanic, and to use their creativity to solve problems.

Built With

• aseprite
• c#
• unity