Judge Game
About
You take control of a judge who has recently died and stays in purgatory. Death is having a hard time deciding where to put you, heaven or hell, so he has come up with a solution: he will give you his job, for 5 days. Let's see how well can you perform at this job, and where you will end up at!
PLAYTEST BUILD
Welcome back after about a month! The game has changed pretty significantly design-wise from the previous build. We decided to leave the tutorial from the game, as it felt a bit un-needed. Instead, we went ahead with making the first day easier to decide, while also putting Death's welcome speech to make the players understand the point of the game. We also removed the timer from the game, as in the end, it doesn't have any impact on the game. Moreover, this also put the players in the thought that they need to speedrun it, while we want to have the game the opposite feeling.
As a quick mention, as a team, we decided to make the game more of an amazing 5-minute experience, than a mediocre long-time experience. This is because we realized we are going a bit too far with the game, and rather play the safe 'quality over quantity' card.
Most of the changes are described in the presentation, that we prepared for you, but here is also a quick summary of what happened to the game! :)
Cinematic cameras - as we decided to go with the static camera, the game looked a bit boring to be without any changes on the screen. Thus, we decided to put focus on making the camera move around the scene. We tried our best to make it as least likely to cause a headache as possible, however, this is a part where we also ask for your feedback on - is the camera okay when it is travelling, or should we keep it all teleport, like for the Angel, Devil and the Fish?
We also made the statements more automatic to give a more cinematic experience. The player has the option to skip one dialogue or all of them.
New telephone mechanic - we turned the phone into a call-a-friend mechanic, where the player can call Death to get a hint on the current soul. This is limited to only three times during the whole day, to make sure the game is not too easy. We tried our best to make the hints helpful, but also not too helpful.
Consequences at the end of the day - once the day is finished, the player will get a call from death on what happened to the souls that the player put in heaven or hell. Considering we have 2 souls a day, for 5 days, and each soul has 2 outcomes - this gives us 20 different outcomes :) We are thinking that this increased the replayability the most from all our changes.
Interacting with every object - every object on the desk is currently interactable, however, these might be still adjusted. The player could previously only interact with the book and the phone, while now they can also interact with the fish, pens, plants and statues. These are less impactful on the game but we thought it is funny to have at least small interactions there.
Colourblind settings - after the previous meeting we actually started to think about how we can improve the accessibility of our game, and the first thing we came up with is the colourblind settings. This is found in options, although right now the only option we have here is to set the colour of the text. In the future, we are planning to add more features to it, such as adding the tint to interactable objects.
Five endings - we finally came up with the ways to end up the game (took us a while lol) and we have five different endings based on the player's performance.
KNOWN BUGS & PROBLEMS
The only way to know whether the soul was placed correctly is that on the completion of the day the player gets to know it by seeing it by text. We think of instead having that, we would have visual feedback on the portals towards which the camera goes when the soul is sorted.
The souls still use Unreal's default mesh. This is because we went with many different redesigns to the souls, to make sure they are fitting the game. This is our priority to make the soul mesh imported, as this is the one thing that makes the game not seem as cool as we want it to.
The soul has weird interactions with the collisions when picked up - we wanted it to not be able to go through the platform, but adding these collisions made it interact weird with characters. Still working on fixing that!
The heaven portal - we had the portal adjusted so it is less blocky, although we run into a problem with the file not being saved properly due to a crash. Hence this needs to be redone, and thus the old version of the portal is still in.
Some lines are still not in, for which we just use a placeholder 'empty' 5-second voice line, which may end up with some dialogues being too short or too long.
TEAM
Programmers - WIKTOR ZBOROWSKI, GEORGI VICHEV
Designers - EUAN BRADSHAW
Artists - KATIE ROSS, REECE CLARK, DANIEL SIMPSON, KIRSTEN LAIRD, LETH MCKAY, NIAMH MCALLISTER, ZOE VON RUNKEL, KYLE FORBES