Remember to Dismember is a four-week prototype made by me and four other game developers. Our primary goals were to prototype the different controllers (First person zombie, hand, and eye) with the systems that would be used with them and to prototype the environment aesthetic. Specifically we wanted the hand climbing walls to feel great and to be similar to the hand from the Adam's family, the zombie to feel slow, and the eye to feel limited and constrained since it is only 1 eye. The environment we wanted to feel dark and drab like an old abandoned house to add an element of horror to its narrative.
I think the biggest shortcomings of this prototype were a lack of player communication in some areas and that the camera controls for the hand felt a bit wonky. It also suffered from players feeling frustrated about forgetting to pick up their body parts and having to back track to get them. For player communication, I think we needed to fine tune our notes a bit more to help players learn what to do in certain areas. Some of them were too cryptic or even directly misleading. For the hand, I think I should have played some third-person games more so I was better equipped to make it. I primarily play first-person games so there might have been a bit of a disconnect there. Lastly, some ideas we threw around for helping players get their body parts was to either have a recall option (automatically returns to the player) or to have them automatically return to the player if they get too far away.
If you experience trouble with the WebGL build please download the windows version on the itch page below.
Also note that lighting is better in the Windows build because WebGL limits active lights.
My Contributions
Designed 3 different character controllers
First-Person Zombie - The player starts off as a zombie in first person with the ability to crouch, pull boxes, read notes, and a few various interactions. This served as the base for the player and is intended to help them better integrate into the game. I wanted to keep it simplistic and to help emphasize that you are a slow zombie. This is why jump is not a part of the feature set.
Reading Notes
Crouching
Pulling Boxes
Hand - The hand is one of the zombies detachable limbs that lets the player climb walls and access smaller locations such as vents or gaps through walls. My inspiration for this was the hand from the Adam's family and I wanted it to feel like you were scurrying around. The hardest part was getting climbing to feel how I wanted it to be without it being too disorienting.
Remove Hand
Example of climbing around on wall
Climb Wall Through Vent
Going over Gaps
Eye - The eye serves as a pseudo camera that allows players to see otherwise invisible icons. Originally we wanted to have a monster chase the player as well and it would be used to watch corners while the player controlled the hand but this was cut out of our scope to focus on other aspects of the prototype. This had two different implementations, one for walls and another for ceilings. This is because it felt awkward on the ceiling so I changed it to rotate around its current axis instead.
Seeing Symbols
On Wall
On Ceiling
Optimized the game to run effectively on all platforms
Our game needed to be optimized heavily to run on webGL at 60 FPS. To achieve this I set up our occlusion culling, static batching, various code optimizations, and baked lighting. Each came with their own difficulties. For example, occlusion culling worked perfectly for the first-person controller but the third-person camera would sometimes occlude the surrounding when the camera was put up against walls. To fix this, I increased the clipping distance slightly so that it would clip through walls to remove the occlusions.
Editor Stats
Occlusion Culling
Handled all of the environment lighting
The lighting was a big undertaking as it was a huge component for selling the mood of our game. The bright fires were used to draw players attention to different locations and the rest of the environment was kept dark. As an added touch, I added flickering lights to certain places to make the atmosphere feel more horror-esque.
Lever Lights
Flickering Lights
Note Lighting
Implemented various puzzle elements
While I was not the designer of our puzzles, I did perform the implementation of them and helped give feedback on how we can assist players in learning our mechanics. Specifically with the hand puzzles, I thought it would be good to add bloody handprints where the hand needed to go. With the eye puzzles, I also added the eye symbols to let players know where to use the eye at.
Created Shader Effects
In our initial playtests, players had a lot of difficulty finding their leftover limbs. To help mitigate this, I added a Fresnel effect to all of the player meshes, and added a silhouette through walls.
Hand and Eye Sillouette
Eye Fresnel
Player Fresnel
Hand Fresnel
Scripted all of the functionality for the game
Yet again I was the solo software engineer on a project (always happens to me lol). Luckily I had more experience with 3D this time and was able to make sure things felt more cohesive. I handled all of the stuff mentioned earlier, the menus, a light flickering script, all interactable objects, etc. A lot of work and a lot of scripts later and I have the functional prototype you see before you.