During my final year of study at university, I created Breakout, a first person story game which aimed to teach players mechanics through subliminal methods while also establishing a sense of flow.
Apart from environmental assets, which where sourced, all aspects of the game were created by myself. This included all level design, systems design, mechanics design (and while very limited) UI design. I also programmed the whole game myself using Unreal Engine's blueprint system. The heavy programming side of the project was a particular focus going in to the project as previously I hadn't had much practise using visual coding so I wanted to gain some experience.
One particular challenge I faced when developing the project was designing systems to work both independently as well as being able to coherently blend together depending on the situation. The main example in the demo was the baseball which can interact with all other mechanics featured in the experience. The baseball can be thrown as well as magnetically recalled to the player on its own but can also turn on buttons, be electrified and kill drones.
Another problem I faced during development was subliminally guiding and teaching players through the experience. This was aided by research through a literature review and close reading of Half-Life 2 which was part of my dissertation. This provided a background that helped design a number of subliminal cues that pushed players forward in the experience.
A full playthrough as well as screenshots can be found below.
