Overshadowed

I created Overshadowed (along with Harlen Postill, Alexander Maturan and Gordon Huang) for a Game Design course at university. I was primarily responsible for gameplay programming, as well as designing Level 3.

Overshadowed was featured at the UTS Student Games Showcase and won Best Game from Game Design Methodologies.

Technologies Used

Lessons

• Puzzle Design. This wasn’t a discipline I had particularly experimented with before. There are countless things I learned from this — some of which I will discuss in later points — but an aspect which I struggled to accept was that I had to stop trying to show off to players. I’m writing particularly about the final puzzle of Level 3, which makes clever use of the glass mechanic, elevation, and blocks disrupting light flow. While these are all conceptually interesting ideas, users were consistently confused, and really struggled with this puzzle. What I should have done is rework it from the concept up, but I was so pleased with it that I just kept tweaking it, and ultimately, users never really got it.
• Art Style. Effectively all of the (3D) art assets in this game are store-bought. I am very proud of the way we integrated them together, to form a cohesive and relatively unique visual identity. Ultimately, this was guided by the artistic vision we had — calm, minimal, similar to Monument Valley. This effect is achieved by two main things: shaders, and lighting. We performed colour-space quantisation on the full frame, which reduced the number of colours and helped create the minimal effect. The sky shader with stars both highlighted the minimalism of the level design, and provided a visual bridge between the hand-drawn style of the trailer, and the minimal 3D style of the game.
• User Testing. This is by far the most important learning of this project. User testing is incredibly vital and there is no amount that is “too much”. There are countless things we changed as a result of user testing, the most important of which was the control scheme. Overshadowed is an isometric game, so choosing a control scheme presented a challenge. In testing, users chose screen-space coordinate controls and world-space coordinate controls at an approximately 50/50 rate. Ultimately, I created a system to automatically assign a control scheme to users based on their first second of inputs (unfortunately, by the time I had implemented it, I had run out of time to user test). It was a mixed success — it certainly helped some users, while choosing the wrong control scheme for others. Realistically, I think a better solution would be to explicitly prompt the user, but I (once again) got distracted trying to be clever, at the cost of the game. This project truly drummed the importance of user testing in my head, a mindset I have taken forward into my other projects.

All em dashes in this post were ethically sourced. No LLMs were used in the creation of these, nor any other punctuation marks.