Paige Turner & The Last Story is the current project I am working on. While it is listed with my other game projects here I wanted to talk more about it in depth about this game, including the work I have done for the project so far, the process the team has gone through with the game, and what our plans are going forward.
Paige Turner Vs. The World
Our original idea for Paige and her journey through the library was a lot more violent than its current, puzzle oriented incarnation. In her journey to restore order to the library, Paige was going to use her book, The Last Story, to physically fight the origami creatures that escaped from their stories. The team ended up abandoning the combat oriented direction for 2 main reasons:
- Our scope really didn’t allow it.
- Using a book as a weapon clashed with our theme pretty hard.
As far as the first problem goes, the tech side of our team lost a member part way through production. Leaving me the only core programmer left on the team. Cutting our tech team in half meant that something in our game was going to have to give, which brings me to problem 2.
When the team looked at Paige Turner & The Last Story trying to decide what was going to be cut to accommodate our shift in team members we realized something. No one was really a big fan of Paige running around hitting things with books. Books are often seen as objects of learning, of introspection, and exploration. Not violence or force. This is one of the primary reasons why despite constant iteration and changes, combat was never really clicking with our players. Our art style and setting didn’t convey fighting to them, it conveyed something different.
Turning The Paige On Our Game
With combat getting the axe, Paige needed a new focus. We ultimately decided to go forward with a puzzle/exploration based direction. Some of the designers, myself included, have a lot of experience with puzzle design. It’s something that came easily to us. In addition, while our team lost a tech member we gained more artists, meaning we could now generate more assets for puzzles, and further polish and refine our existing ones to match our new direction.
Our main goal with our refocus is to emphasize exploring the library and solving puzzles in order to put the escaped origami creatures and objects back in order, restoring peace to the library in the process. With this shift in direction came a shift in what I was doing for the team which brings me to the final section I wanted to talk about.
What Have I Done For This Project
From the beginning I have had my hands deep into the programming roots of our project. Creating the character controller, combat system (now removed), menus, and a nifty Player Status Manager. All using Unity’s C# integration.
For my team I also made a number of tools to use while working on our project. The biggest of these is my Interaction Logic which easily allows anyone working on the project to connect code across objects using Unity Events. I also made a text parser to easily sort through and load character dialog from text files into Unity at runtime. This allowed our writers to create less text files overall and write in the program of their choice.
With our new shift in direction my tasks now are to build an infrastructure for tracking puzzle progress. In addition because of the nature of our puzzle solving I also need to create Paige’s inventory system and code behavior for each puzzle item that needs something unique. In addition I have taken on the role of Technical Lead for the team, meaning I am in charge of our code architecture and style.
Nick Cascio 