Posted June 08, 2025 by Ethan Good
##gamedev #devblogs #devblog #gamedesign #unity #madewithunity #c# #programming #coding #leveldesign
Hello everyone!
I've been working on a project with a team of six to develop a final, "capstone" vertical slice to demonstrate our skills as graduating gamedevs looking to get into the industry. This is my first DevBlog, but I'm not going to overload any of you with exposition. Instead, I wanted to talk about my adaptation of the "pipe minigame" from a beloved video game classic, Bioshock. I should note that, while this minigame is inspired by the iconic game, it's more of an adaptation of the idea as opposed to a mechanical 1-to-1.
If your a fan of Bioshock like me, you could see why I was excited to test my Unity skills and recreate this minigame for our final project. Just like Bioshock, our final project game is a first-person shooter that allows you to access a "2D" minigame experience where you trade your first-person shooter controls in for a simple click-and-drag mouse game. When you access the not-so-2D minigame adaptation I created, the image below is what you're greeted with.
A bunch of pipes, out of order (just like in Bioshock), and your job is to connect the pipes together in a way that allows liquid to flow to all of the starting/ending pipe pieces. If you couldn't tell, I designed the pipes myself, from the textures (which utilize base materials available in Adobe Substance 3D Painter) to the models, which I'm pretty proud of. It never gets old seeing assets you made come to life in a game.
Where this differs from Bioshock:
- The pipes cannot be rotated, how you see them is how they will stay throughout the game.
- Instead of "swapping" pipes, these pipes can be "dragged and dropped" at the desired location.
- Instead of playing the pipe game to "hack" certain enemies or kiosks, this pipe game is use to unlock a mechanically locked door.
- Our minigame can be exited and reentered at any point during gameplay without consequence
Without further ado, how about you see for yourself how the minigame turned out in our early game:
As you could see in the video, the block of our minigame's console/terminal was where the player would go to access the minigame. Due to a lack of UI at this stage of development, you couldn't see it, but E was input with disabled the first-person character's controls, and enabled the mouse movement. The mouse could then be used to click and drag pipes to new locations, but the pipes could not be placed on top of other pipes, and would instead snap to the nearest open location. Once the pipes were in the correct spots, the minigame automatically closed, and the player's first-person controls were restored. Also, I am using audio I clipped from Pixabay.com, so hopefully you guys like those sounds.
Anyways, I just wanted to showcase what I had so far, this was a fun mechanic to design and add to our game and I can't wait to see what everyone thinks about it come release!
Until then, you'll have to wait to give our game a try!
See you guys again soon,
Goodbye!