The Theatre
The Theatre is a project that I worked on with my classmate Derrick Kraft during our first year of The Bachelor of Game Design program. We decided to combine all the final projects of that year into one game and managed to fulfill the learning goals of each separate class with this product. This was done over a 96-hour crunch period that we managed to complete, but we did have to scrap specific elements of the game.
For this project, I was the Programmer, Game Designer, Level Designer, and Audio Designer. Derrick, who is more artistically inclined, was the artist, animator, and general storyline designer, all of which I implemented into the final project.
The Design
The Theatre is a Story-Rich game where your choices matter. There are a few puzzles throughout the game, but our goal was to create a game that tells a unique and dynamic storyline piloted by text-based decisions similar to the dialogue trees of Mass Effect but with more of a comedic tone. We never had much hope for developing any sort of difficult mechanics-based challenges as they were not required for fulfilling the learning outcomes of the assignments, so we focused more on the story.
Speaking of the story, we wanted to accentuate the contrast between the fairly somber storyline and the dry humor that makes up most of the dialogue (Figure 1). This story deals with issues of drug abuse, loss, and the relationship between a father and his daughter. We had to cut a lot of the specific information that explained the name “The Theatre” due to our deadlines, but we have written the entire story and narrative beats. An example of this would be the beloved Dr. Fuzzywumpus, a mob boss that is also an insane-looking cat (Figure 2), who unfortunately did not make it to the final release of the game.
For the dialogue in the game, we used the Plugin Fungus which saved a major amount of time programming a dialogue system. Fungus has pre-developed choice trees and a fairly simple interface, which was extremely helpful in the development process. Along with that, I created the audio with the free software Bosca Ceoil which is a really simple way to create MIDI audio tracks.
Figure 4 : Part 1 of an example of a simple feature that took a large amount of time to create
Figure 5 : Part 2 the wall opens and allows sight inside the building. This function is used multiple times throughout the game
Programs:
Unity, Bosca Ceoil, Adobe Illustrator, SPINE, Fungus
Figure 1 : Example of comedy to the game
Figure 2 : Picture of the Mad Mob boss “Dr. FuzzyWumpus”
Figure 3 : Example of the dialogue system managing camera movement
What I learned
There were many simple things that I took for granted before going into this project. I assumed that the mechanics of the game would be the simplest aspect and writing out all the dialogue would be a time-consuming process, I was very very wrong.
I also learned about time management. As I briefly mentioned, this project was completed in its entirety over the course of 96 hours with my classmate, we worked an unhealthy amount and it was an experience I don’t intend to replicate, but…
This was one of the best design experiences in my career
No, it wasn’t healthy or something I hope to reenact, but I learned to quickly problem solve, adapt, and release a product within a time constraint. It may not be perfectly polished but I have revisited this project multiple times and understand where my shortcomings were. This reaffirmed my desire to be a designer and is a prime example of my dedication to projects that I am passionate about.