Dead Man's Shoes

Game about joining a games studio and getting ahead in industry by any means necessary.

 

About

Project created over the summer holidays as a fun, creative way to show my CV and display what I am capable of, while developing myself as a programmer and game developer.

Dead Man’s Shoes is a short, re-playable game where you play as a recently hired employee who constantly seeks promotion. The game provides multiple ways to gain promotion. Do you earn your promotion through developing your skills and helping the studio, or do you ignore all morals and “sabotage” the other employees?

 

Controls

W, A, S, D    - Movement

Shift         - Sprint

Space         - Jump

Left Ctrl     - Crouch

LMB           - Shoot/Click

RMB           - Throw

E             - Interact

Esc (twice)   - Quit game

 

Tools used

Dead Man’s Shoes has been developed in Unity 2020.1.6f1 and uses FMOD for all audio.

 

Future/potential improvements and known issues

Procedural mesh destruction

The procedural mesh destruction project I made for one of my university modules has been used for the game. Its use can be seen twice for breaking a window and a pane of glass. Most of the time, the destruction works without fail, however, there is a chance the glass does not break properly, creating 10 new panes of glass instead of shattering into smaller pieces.

 

Lighting

This has been my first time experimenting with additional lighting options within Unity, primarily using emissive materials and baking the light into the level. The end result worked out quite well, however, there are some patches where the lighting has not baked properly, making the walls look quite “blotchy”. I have narrowed down the issue towards my use of Probuilder and its built-in UV mapping, and the lighting settings used.

Going forward, I want to experiment more with lighting and get it done correctly, especially as I plan to incorporate URP/HRDP into my projects.

 

Music/Ambience

All audio is played through FMOD. Most of the sounds are 2D or 3D oneshot but no music or ambience is present within the game. Ambience would have suited the game better than music, especially with the number of unique rooms and FMOD could have been used to blend and swap between different ambience tracks with ease.

 

Render pipeline

Unity’s default render pipeline was used. While it was not compulsory to use URP or HRDP, they would have allowed the use of the shader graph and add post processing effects, allowing me to create my own object highlight and make the game look more visually appealing.

 

Minor bugs

• The glass pane on the third day can get in the way of the player after destroying it
• Some collision issues regarding shooting chains
• Picking up far away items does not always attach them to the right point on the player

 

Potential minor improvements

• Change key bindings within the menu (incorporate the updated Input Manager?)
• Change the volume of more sounds (e.g. talking, footsteps, special effects)
• Have the direction of the NPC’s tripping be based on where the player hit them, not move them in a fixed way
• Further develop the first day minigame/give it more depth
• Allow the NPCs for each day interact with the player in some way/fight back
• Speed up and skip text/press a button to move onto the next text instead of letting a timer deal with it