Stretching Desired Performance

After releasing the first version of Glyph Hunter : 3D I want to return to the projects that enabled me to create the game and discuss how said projects influenced the development experience.

Cathodism is a game created for a 5 day game jam, where teams rapidly designed, built and tested escape / puzzle games (design week of spring 2022). Because the nature of an escape puzzle experience (physical or digital)  is for the guest to interact with the space which contains them the design of an escape game in Unity 3D would require a considerable amount of interaction between the player and the objects in the game world. The team chose to use a WASD movement system to facilitate the player moving between different areas and the E key for interacting with various puzzles. This control system also required the player to move the camera rotation with their mouse, in order to give them full 360 degree control. This approach is quite common, and worked excellently for the time frame it was constructed in, but limited the player demographic to only gamers who have immediate access to both a keyboard and mouse when playing.

A common point of feedback that the team from GBD Mansion Game received was that players wanted to look up and down freely while exploring the house. That feature was not necessarily intended for the cinematic gameplay, but did show a desire for players to feel more connected to the camera they were controlling. There was an attempt to migrate  the camera from Cathodism over to the GBD Project, but the idea was never implemented due to time constraints and design concerns.

The result of both these player controllers is what is seen in Glyph Hunter : 3D where players can select movement points and rotate the camera just by using the mouse. Having only one input method is an accessibility asset as this enables it to function on any device with a cursor (meaning touch screens / tablets). The system for picking up and dropping items from Cathodism was also modified for Glyph Hunter : 3D to utilize the left mouse button in order to activate game interactions, similar to the experience in the GBD Project.

Final Conclusion:

https://ericcousins.itch.io/glyphhunter3d/devlog/392350/building-videogames-like...