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Project Development

Stowaway was a game made for my final project in the Major Project module at university, for the assignment I had to complete a game alongside three other students in the class who all implemented their own individual talents into the project. My roles in the project were project leader, programmer and audio designer. In the early stages of the project we conceptualised and made a plan for the game together and presented a project proposal.

Throughout the project, I picked up new skills by designing the alien behaviour using Unity’s Nav Mesh, recording and editing my own audio files through Audacity and learned I more about Unity’s audio components and how manipulate them in scripting. We were able to get a satisfactory build made before the deadline but there were some features that we had to leave out due to time constraints. Because of this a lot of our time during the end of the project was to create a playable build that can be experienced from start to finish all while I had to make sure there weren’t any bugs.

Core Mechanics

• Equipment Degrading and Repair: Throughout each day more and more pieces of the ship start to break down, the player aim is to fix the ship entirely until the next day. There are 5 different types of puzzles and each is repaired differently, however, if a piece of equipment stays broken for too long it will lead to a game over where the ship explodes.
  
• Alien AI: The alien has three behavior states, and these are controlled by both NavMesh and an alien behavior script.
  • Idle – The alien stands still and observes surroundings.
  • Roaming – The alien moves to a random position on the ship. Once it reaches the random position, it goes back to the idle state and waits for its next location to be selected.
  • Engaging – If the alien sees the player, it begins to chase the player – the alien will continue to chase player until it cannot see them for a certain length of time.
    
• System Reboot: The game takes place over the course of three days starting from day zero (the day the alien is first encountered). At the beginning of day zero the player will receive a notification informing them that it will take three days for a system reboot which is the underlining cause of the equipment failures. On day three when the system is rebooted the player will experience a cutscene where they crush the alien under one of the ship’s doors resulting in a win state where the game resets and the credits play.
  

Screenshots

Build and DevLog

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