And That's a Wrap!

It’s been about three weeks but Memory Lane is finally done! It’s a simple game but different things went into this project so it could be a success. On a basic level, I had to take a few key  objects, people, and moments from my past to make a simple story about how I got to study Game Design at NYU, but the harder aspect of the game’s development was writing certain parts of the code and making the story coherent. From the reactions of the playtester and the audience, I’m glad people enjoyed the game and understood the basic premise of it! There may be a few questions about the project to see why it is the way it is at the moment and I am glad to answer them!

One main question I see people asking is why can they only move in one direction, the answer is simple: once you go forward, you can’t go back! I did this on purpose to reflect how we can’t live in the past since life forces us to move on. Sure, you could stay in a particular area of the game if you wanted to but eventually you will have to move on, grow up, and accept it.

Another question, and one of the faults of the code, is the strange (but fixed) issue with the interactions with the objects. The fault didn’t exist until I made the WebGL build and it was a hard one to fix since nothing in the scripts changed. After getting a second pair of eyes to look at the code, it made me learn something that I never would have realized by staring at my code. In Unity, there is something called a singleton that can be accessed by other scripts to implement something. The thing about these things is that there is supposed to be ONE singleton in the scene AKA the game (most of the time, depending on the game there may be more). In Memory Lane, I had one on each interactable object thinking the “Instance = this;” in the script meant it would make a new singleton per object so my TextAppear script could display my strings when the mouse entered the object. It did and never had an issue with it until WebGL morphed the code into something that confused Unity on which singleton it had to access. I had to remove all the singletons except for one and edit the code a bit to make everything work for the web build.

That singleton was the biggest problem of the game. The player character moving too fast was hard for me to tell since on some runs of the game the character would move slow and other times it would move fast, but that wasn’t too big of an issue. An issue I (not the playtesters) have with the game is some of the music. I’m new to working with audio in Unity but I purposely had several songs play over each other (low priority and volume music) at certain points to make a mood or bring the player’s attention to something that is happening. This could have been done better in my opinion but I’m not sure how I could fix it. For example, when you enter the lounge where two video games are being played, in real life it would make sense since Guitar Hero and Smash Bros. have music and you would hear the music of both games playing at the same time. In the game, it may not work the same way and it might lead to the player getting confused, I bet I could have used another audio function to make it better, if I have to implement several songs at the same time again I will play around with the functions until it works. .

Other than that I am pleased with everything else in the game. The graduation gowns were a last minute addition because I thought “why would everyone but you have a gown in graduation”, and I believe it was a great addition! I’m also proud of the thought bubbles of text because I wanted to create another canvas that would have my thoughts displayed on the bottom of the screen. The text would change in every new area I would enter but I didn’t have time to implement that so I made the bubbles and text in an art program. The music choices were great and the backgrounds, objects, and people came out well! I would love to continue working on it so it could be cleaner and longer to show more of the story!

Playtest Notes:

Questions: How do you feel about the speed of the character? - speedy, not surprised

Was the text readable? -Yes, hooray!

Good autoBio game! - PT

Have an instruction/tutorial to tell them about hovering. Make it clear why you can only move forward

How come it's not displaying? It was fine before.

Music is too loud? -  Couldn’t tell