Precipice

You can play Precipice here.

Precipice is my submission to The Edge Create Challenge. The challenge was simply to make a game using Unity3d around the theme Edge. The competition began on March 6th, but I only got word of it around the beginning of April, so I knew I had a lot of catching up to do if I was going to be able to submit anything. I was working on an Easter game that was nearly complete but I decided to put that on hold until next year.

The theme edge can really be interpreted many ways, and I immediately thought of games with edged weapons, swords, ninjas etc. However those types of games have been done many ways, very well for a long time now. I considered digging up one of my old video game ideas, but figured it would be too large to create in the span of two weeks. Two days passed and I really thought about what it means to be on the edge, and what could possibly be made into a game with someone on the edge. I thought of a line I remembered hearing from a movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, "Well that's where we are. You say we're on the brink of destruction and you're right. But it's only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve. This is our moment. Don't take it from us, we are close to an answer." And so Precipice was born.

Precipice allows you to play the role of a crisis negotiator who is tasked with helping bring peaceful resolutions to various dangerous situations. In designing this game I researched a bit about the science behind crisis negotiation as well as studies on depression and suicide. I never expected to be researching topics like these in order to build a game, but it was interesting to study them briefly. In this early version I cut things down to a single scenario with a woman who is attempting to jump off the edge of a building. Ideally I wanted this game to offer multiple scenarios and endings depending on how the player reacts to the situation. But as I was writing the dialogue I realized just how many different paths a conversation could go, and it became very clear that I didn't have the time to truly explore all these different paths.

The 3d models for the game were all made with Blender. I initially wanted to save some time by using a city generator to quickly get buildings, and by using a "human generator" called Make Human to make the characters.  However I decided that it would be better for me to make the models myself, not only as a learning experience, but just to say that I was able to do it on my own. It took about 3 days to make the models, texture them, rig them (give them skeletons) and finally animate them. They are far from perfection, but for my first ever biped characters I can't complain.

The code for the game was all very straight forward. There were no amazing feats of programming necessary, but I did get stuck along the way on a few things. The dialogue system became a huge problem towards the very end of the development time. Right before the game was due, I noticed that the point system for response wasn't working properly and I had to quickly make major changes that eliminated the randomness of the dialogue. Without random responses the game loses a large amount of gameplay in my opinion. Also because of various bugs, I don't believe you can make it to the end of the dialogue without problems happening. It is unfortunate, but I made the difficult choice to release the game with these bugs, rather than scratch the project completely.

I should also mention that the user interface for the game was done with Unity3d and not any 3rd party systems, for better or for worse. I considered using NGUI, but I didn't want to learn any new GUI system in the time frame that I had. I have some experience (good and bad) with the Unity "2.0" GUI system so I felt most comfortable using it for the interface.