Role
Software Used
Genre
Platform
Programmer
Unity, C#
First Person Narrative
PC
Game Overview
Prseverance is a game driven largely by it's narrative. It's key themes revolve around life, what constitutes it, and whether humanity deserves a second change on a new planet. Players take on the role of an AI Mars rover, Perseverance, who must locate signs of life on Mars while remaining in contact with scientists on Earth.
Over the course of the game Perseverance's AI will develop, becoming more life like and gradually developing sentience. This is demonstrated through dialogue with the scientist. Perseverance will start to show emotional reactions to it's surroundings, will question the scientist on life, and whether humanity even deserves a second chance on earth.
Production Overview
Perseverance was the first game where I had the opportunity to work in a team for a Unity game. It was developed in around four weeks, and having two other teammates meant the workload was able to be split up.
With more time to devote solely to programming this was a great opportunity for me to experiment more in Unity and grow my skills with object oriented programming. As a narrative driven game, my main goal was to create a branching dialogue system myself. I was able to complete this goal, and our narrative designer was able to implement all the dialogue using the system in the engine.
This dialogue system drove much of the game, and playtesting showed that players would become very attached to Perseverance as it explored Mars.
My Responsibilities
As the sole programmer, I was responsible for implementing most of the core mechanics. My key contributions were:
Setting up the first person character
Creating a branching dialogue system
Dialogue system was based on nodes connected through unique IDs
Designers could go in engine and place dialogue triggers with sequences build in to the objects
Placing objects in Unity
Creating a system for collecting and logging clues
