The Dawn Of Pripyat

Desgin & Code & Art: FoxMiao | Time: 4 Weeks | Engine: Unity

Game Type: Single Player

Player Goal: Find the password

Scop: 5min gameplay

Something goes wrong in Chornobyl after the reactor explosion.

Players will sit inside a dark room control a robot, and interact with the things on the operation table.

Players will visit different locations from the mission introduction page,
At the same time, players will find notes written down by previous workers,
By following different guides, players will get different endings.

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System Design

Game Flow

(Early Concept)

Players will have two screens to look at. One is a top-down view screen that only shows the dangerous areas, and the other one shows the robot players controlling.

Players must look at the screen on the left side to power up the correct options to make the robot survive in dangerous areas.

There are three things players can power up; Heat and Radiation are for dangerous places; if Heat and Radiation are turned on, the robot won’t have enough power to run the camera, so players need to change the powers to their needs.

There are password pieces left around the map; players need to look around their table to find the locations of those pieces.

The box players will unlock will be the end of the game, maybe the end of their life, too.

Technical Design

* Most of the decisions I made for the technical design are to support the game design. Tech design, for me, is more about making decisions between different outcomes, not how the game functions on the backend.

The tables are built with 2D drawings and sample shapes of 3D objects.

How did I create this table without any 3D modeling?

Players spend all of their time on the table to give the board texture and give it a 3D look; I designed all the components of the table main table in 2D and built them with a table station that is built with simple cubes.

The 2D drawing

For things like camera movement, players don’t have free movement; they can only look around by clicking arrows.

The big question is: Why don’t allow players to look around freely?

First, The Dawn of Pripyat is a game that needs players to focus on the information they get; locking the camera at four different points will make players understand those pictures are not just decorations.

Second, there are few cut scenes between the game; to make an immersive experience, a locked camera can make the transition smoother.

Last, this is a four-week project. Seeing the players' view from the front can give me more time to add more details to the table.

The Station with 2D drawing(In Editor)

Camera movement are made by Five different Cinemachine Camera.

The Station without 2D drawing

Projection

I chose projection to do storytelling in the beginning; I don’t want to use a cutscene or something that breaks the player from the immersive of the room, and the projection gives the game a more “I’m on a mission” vibe.

The project is a bit complex with how it functions; and I need to give up on using URP, which I will go over more reason later.

Projection in Editor

Projection in Game

How camera work in editor

CRT/VHS Effect, duo screen

The Dawn of Pripyat is a game that wants to put the players in an old robot operation room; all the setup needs to be old, which can create an immersive experience.

There are two displays, and each display is a camera render texture; at the same time, I use a 3rd party asset called VHS Pro to create the effect.

Game with VHS effect

How game look like

Colors

Most of the things in The Dawn of Pripyat are color-coded; all the warning buttons are in different areas.

Even the main puzzle boxes are color based.

All the light of an object is made with point light, not emission. Emission only works in Universal Render Pipeline, but the VHS effect I use does not work with URP.