Legend of the Museum is a Year 3 university group project, following a brief given to our group by National Museum Scotland in Edinburgh. The game is a puzzle-RPG following Dolly the Sheep as she tries to save her museum after it has been distorted. Dolly explores the distorted museum interacting with real exhibits and talking to her clones.
My Contributions
For this project I acted as lead programmer, I worked with our design and art team to decide where to place our focus, and worked with the other programmer in our group to assign work efficiently. My primary contribution to the project inlcluded reworking the core mechanics to run more efficiently when played in-browser, and creating half of the puzzles in the game, more detail on these can be seen below. Upon request of the client there where some features programmed by myself that were removed from the final version of the game, such as, a combat mechanic which had to be removed as it was seen to be outwith the tone the client wanted, and a more complex movement system used for platforming sections that were removed as the client felt they detracted from the educational experience of the game.
The Morse code puzzle I built for the game takes inputs from the player based on their interaction with the panels seen on the ground, the corresponding dot or dash is stored in a string variable in a minigame manager object. Once the correct amount of inputs is reched for the current letter, the string is compared against a master string in the minigame manager, if the string matches the letter is shown on screen and the player may continue with the next letter, otherwise the screen flashes red, the player input string is reset to last correct letter and the player is allowed to try again.
The solar system laser puzzle was inspired by the laser puzzles from the portal games, originally the laser continued indefinetely in the set direction, but based on user testing and the target demographic of young children, it was decided that the laser would be set at the correct length for the corresponding planet regardless of the direction facing, as it was easier for children to figure out the correct sequence. The puzzle works by simply setting a line render as a child of each planet, if the previous planet in the sequence is set to the correct rotation, the line render in the current planet is set to be active.
The tile puzzle requires the player to complete the puzzle by stepping on every tile a single time, if the player steps on a tile that is already active, the tiles flash red and the player is returned to the start with all the tiles set back to being inactive, if the player completes the puzzle then the door to the next room is opened.