Adrift: Adrift Final Notes

Video:

Results of Playtests & Changes (Garret Wied):

A common theme from our play-test was that in order to teleport, players said their neck would hurt after a while. A way we combated this was by positioning teleport nodes to be at not such extreme angles from one another and by adding more. Also, the enemy would kill you immediately, but we fixed it to where it does not anymore by adding a health system. This was a unique challenge as we wanted the player to be aware of their health, but without have a stationary UI element constantly in the HUD. So to alert the player of their health, we have a heartbeat the player can hear, the more damage they take, the faster it gets. Finally, the enemy walks backwards slowly for few seconds before teleporting away, only to come after you again.

Narrative Design & Sound (Kevin Benavides):

For our final stretch of our game, we felt that we needed a little more immersion for our short story. We had gotten the minimal viable product done, so we added in more collectibles and dialogue for the player to listen to. I wrote the dialogue and spread around some collectibles for the player to hear/read it. Additionally, just to add another degree of immersion, we recorded ourselves reading the dialogue and I applied some fun filters/effects in Audacity to make us sound like astronauts. Since we were focusing on polish as well, I went ahead and made some minor edits to some of the sounds already. It mostly involved tuning the volume controls of various objects and improving the spacial audio so the player can hear the alien monster coming sooner.

Applying Leveller Effect to Dialogue Recordings

Since we added a health system, I sourced a heartbeat and package tearing sound effect for our player and health packs respectively. Those SFX are implemented now as well.

As a minor touch, I updated our game's icon as well so it doesn't have the default Unity icon.

Scripting (Laksha Parajuli):

The player now has health instead of being one-shotted. We rebalanced the enemy to be faster and by having to stare at it for longer before it goes away. Health is represented by a heartbeat, the faster the heartbeat the lower the health remaining. The enemy now also moves away from the player when being stared at. The audio logs in the scene now pop up text and play dialogue when interacted with.