Ethyne Rush

Our first school project with a 3D toolset, using Unity and FMOD. The objective was to make a toy: basically a game that has no predefined objective, containing a set of rules and constraints that offer the potential for challenge. Another constraint we were given was a mandatory theme: "Min/Max".

For this project, I served as Lead Programmer and Music Composer. I was deciding which techniques to use while coding, supervising the changes the other team members were making to the codebase, and fixing bugs or refactoring if necessary. I also took care of the GitHub repository for the project. On the music side of things, I composed, produced and mastered it in a few weeks using FL Studio, then integrated it with the help of our Sound Designer within the FMOD project for the game.

The game's speed is amplified by a few post-processing effects

game design 🢆

We decided to make a first-person action game with heavy emphasis on movement. Big inspirations were notably Team Fortress 2, Titanfall 2 and Mirror's Edge, which are all games where movement is crucial and encouraged through mechanics, and emergent techniques can be used by experienced players to propel them further.

Our main goal was to bring a sensation of speed and a "hypnotic, vertiginous" feeling to our players. We gave them two mechanics to travel vertically and horizontally - walljumps and slides respectively - and made them stick with our given theme by giving the player extra speed as they use them. Players can then attain potentially infinite speeds, while the system keeps fighting against their momentum.

In order to keep the player's momentum going beyond our intended level design, we thought of giving players the ability to place walls around them, so they could bounce off their own creations. We also decided to make a recursive game space, so that players could keep going faster and faster without being stopped by world borders.

Speed thresholds change the colors of the entire screen

art direction & relation with game design 🢆

For players to measure their performance and create objectives for themselves, we integrated what we called "speed thresholds", massively inspired by the Zone mode in the beloved WipEout series. These thresholds are exclusively sensory: when you reach a certain speed level, the music evolves and the colors of the world change, up to a point where they reach extreme contrast and brightness values.

For the art direction, we borrowed from our futuristic inspirations, while adding a hint of brutalism. We made massive use of visual effects and post-processing to amplify the sensation of speed we wanted the players to experience, like motion blur, chromatic abberation and field of view amplification - taking inspiration from a shooter game released a few months prior, HYPER DEMON.

In terms of music, we settled on a Techno / Trance hybrid, genres of music often associated with psychedelia and futurism. As mentioned earlier, the music climbs in intensity according to the player's current threshold level - up until level 4, where the player goes so fast that the music transcends tempo and become an intense ambient piece. Transitioning from each threshold to the other is made using sound effects synched to the tempo, and if the player stops, the music fades out and gives place to ambient sounds that still recall the chords of the main theme.