The Commute - Beginning Movement & Interaction

For our game, The Commute, we got the prompt “Control” for the first week and we started brainstorming different ideas for what we could both do with this concept and how we could implement it into our game. 

I decided to work on the games movement controls and work on an interaction system so that the player can examine items of interest or any of the roaming NPCs in future levels. I wanted to keep it simple for the first playtest, so I just created a simple interaction script that will have text show up above an object to show that the player can examine or speak with that object. 

This is when I thought about having each square show their dialogue in a different part of the screen so that I could see what either format would look like and then during the playtest, have the player answer which format they prefer or if they had a different way in mind. 

I also wanted to work on how the choice mechanic would work and what it could look like in game. I created a trigger at the door allowing the player to enter a different scene and let them interact with a triangle which would ask a question and display two buttons, giving the player a choice to make and make it feel less linear.

This proved to be difficult with the script I was working with, so I wasn’t able to have the buttons laid out in a way I wanted. I’m hoping that after the playtest in conducted, I can restart this idea and figure out how to have the buttons show up where I want them to.