Stitches Project

A 3D puzzle platformer where you must enter minds to exorcise demons taking over the world.

Platform: PC

Final Build Release: 8/12/2019

Role: Designer/Programmer

Team Breakfast Club: Andrew MacDonald, Savanna Gamache, Ashley Corrado, Zachary Fugere, Jeffrey Friedman, Julianna Zegarelli, James Halliday, David Carey

Intent

To create an unsettling, puzzle experience that will make the player uneasy since they must inspect the environment to progress.

General Description

Through a first person perspective, the player needs to enter a memory fragment in each room they move through. To get to the memory fragment, the player will need to rotate portions of the room to change its layout. Sometimes, the memory fragment won’t be active until a puzzle in the room is completed first. This can be putting a book in a bookshelf or connecting wires throughout the room. As they proceed through the exorcee’s house, the levels get more disturbing and complex.

Personal Contribution

With no programmers on the team, I took the role as a stand in programmer and was in charge of the room rotation system. I also coding in many of the other puzzle mechanics and helped design the puzzles we had planned. 

Team Collaboration

This was a very cohesive group. Our product owner, Jeffrey Friedman, did a good job keeping us all on track and working together. Our sprints improved vastly over the time we worked together and our communication was open and honest.

Rotation and “Pizza Spin”

The central mechanic of our game was rotating the room so we had to make sure that mechanic felt right. The early iterations had so many problems, mostly around how Unity handles rotating game objects. There’s an interesting issue where if an object rotates from 360 degrees back to 0 degrees that Unity has a hard time handling. It will make the object to a lightspeed entire rotation every time and it’s very disorienting. My solution here was to continuously reset the rotation values after every spin.

Since the room is made out of segments, I made them all children of a parent object that did the spinning. I made it so the universal parent object will pick which segments to make its children whenever the player made the room spin. After the command went through, the segments would be unparented and the parent object would be empty again. That way, I could reset it’s rotation values to 0 without moving any other objects other than this invisible one.

One of the most infamous bugs we had to figure out was deemed the “Pizza Spin”; it was this strange phenomenon where the player could spin an entire side of a room like a pizza box. This was never an intentional feature and it actually broke a lot of puzzle design when it happened. It was such a mysterious glitch that after weeks of having it in, we couldn’t find a way to replicate it. This required me to rework a large chunk of the rotation system and during this time, I changed how the perspective of the room can be seen. This was actually the way I found the solution to the glitch, seeing that it was based on a few numbers not resetting after each spin. After that was fixed, the rotation system was finally polished and complete.