only shadows

Engine

Unity/Wwise

Language

Project Type

Course Work

Role

Programmer

Duration

~9 Months

As part of my third year, I was involved in a year-long group project. For this, I was mainly a programmer, although I did take on some of the design roles as well, as discussed below.

The brief we were given for the project was based on the movie 'A Field in England', specifically the scene shown to the right. Talking about this scene our brief said;

"We can only imagine what happened in there - a liminal zone of uncertainty, a space seemingly outside our modern frames of reference. Explore the unseen moment, go deep inside the algebra and alchemy of this tent, in this remote field, in this unknowable time. Evoke the extreme condition of our protagonist and his inexplicable turn."

The purpose of the brief was as follows "These people are our ancestors, your great-grandparents. Use the medium of gaming, to portray a different worldview in which science, spirituality and plant technologies constituted a different knowing of the world. Let the player inhabit this world and it’s belief systems that feel so alien to our contemporary mindsets. Root your game in the historical and cultural specifics of the English civil war." We were also told to consider parallel realities. As such the brief was incredibly open-ended and left significant room for my team to come up with our own ideas and interpretations, from this Only Shadows was born.

For this project, I was responsible for the majority of the puzzle mechanics and implementing the various particle effects.

The first main mechanic that I implemented was the 'rotary puzzle'. This was loosely based on this thing I found in a museum (I can't remember what it was), the circular bits could turn, but the cool part was there were magnets on the underside of them, so when you rotated one it affected the others. I thought this would be interesting to have as some sort of puzzle mechanic which affected the area around the player, this initially worked with several archways which, when combined, formed a portal type thing which removed parts of the environment (totally wasn't ripping off Hellblade...)

This version of the puzzle was eventually scrapped due to a change in the game's narrative. However, it was resurrected in a later level in this, the player has to use the puzzle to line up some pillars which open up the path to the next area. This is shown below.

Andrew Milne