Planned updates

Hi there!

I'm the developer of "New Awakening", a game made in Unreal Engine 5 for the 2022 Gamedev.tv Jam.

The theme of the jam was "Death is only the beginning". After a bit of brainstorming I decided for an idea in which your character is a commodity used by a bossy AI to fix things around a mysteriously broken facility. You die multiple times during the operation, but you are "reborn" again and again in the form of a new clone (the old ones remain there for you to see them).

The game is firmly in the "walking simulator" genre. The player goes around interacting with different objects in the facility, while the AI is talking to them, telling them what to do next.

After being available for a few days, I have had the fortune of getting very useful feedback from many of the players that took the time to play it (thanks to all!), and some issues have become very clear.

• Players are getting lost.

There is no navigation system in place, no markers, not even signs of what each area is.

I tried to have the last sentence of the AI be one in which they were telling the player what the objective is, as it is possible to bring up the last sentence by pressing tab. However, at some points I added an extra sentence for flair, or the instruction itself was ambiguous.

For example, at one point the AI asks the player to go outside of the facility. The problem is that there is no sign in the main door that says "main door", while there is a very obvious hole in the wall for a previous section. Some players think they have to go out that way, possibly going the same way they went before.

Another problem is that, in order to leave the dead bodies in the level, a new player character, with his own new HUD, is created each time the player respawns. As the HUD is created for the character, pressing tab will show nothing if the player dies after the instruction is given.

In order to improve all this I'm going to have an extra HUD component that will clearly state the "mission" in the upper part of the screen. This will also fade out after a bit, but pressing tab will bring it out along with the current HUD. I will also add some signs to make it easier to see where things are.

• Dialogue lines can overlap

The way I do dialogue in the game is very primitive, "handcrafted" in a way. I play the voice file, send the text to the HUD, and just wait out a timer before moving on to the next line. This means that I have to check the length of each line, which is very prone to errors. Worse than that, the level blueprint is not making any check to see if a dialogue line is already playing, so the player could trigger multiple dialogue options and have a cacophony of voices in their ears.

In order to avoid voice lines overlapping, I moved some dialogue triggers to non-optimal places, and at the beginning of the game I force the player to move very slowly so they won't reach the next dialogue trigger too quickly. This is messy, and difficult to scale.

For the next update I will implement a dialogue manager that will buffer the voiceover and the text, so it will play them in order. This way, all dialogue can be sent at once, without delays, simplifying the level blueprint, and completely removing overlaps. It will also make it so the player doesn't need to be artificially slowed down at the beginning of the game.

• The main menu is very demanding

The main menu runs much worse than the actual game.

My original vision involved multiple "security" cameras where you can see different parts of the level. When the player starts the game, the camera would zoom into one of the screens, where a capsule with a clone is coming up. After that, the player takes control of the clone and wakes up in that section.

In the end I scrapped the idea due to the deadline getting close, but I forgot to remove the scene renderer components I already had in place. What this means is that the game is rendering not only the background view, but also multiple views of different parts of the level that are never shown (oops!).

It's unfortunate that it released like this, because it's probably creating a very bad first impression, but it's very easy to fix.

In conclusion, I intend to continue updating this game once the rating period of the jam is over. For the next update I will focus on those three issues, but I will also check other things, like the post-process effects strengths, platform collision boxes, clipping, and some other improvements. Of course, I will update the source code link as well.

Thanks for reading this very long post, and thanks for all the feedback!