CAPTCHAD

CAPTCHAD was a group project designed for Creative Alliance with help from members of the Game Developer Group in Royal Leamington Spa, our team was given the brief "venture into danger to receive something of importance and bring it to the beginning". Using this brief we came up with five initial ideas that we mind mapped onto Miro. We all then decided on the idea of an AI escape room. The premises of the game was that the player would awake in a prison cell and must find a way to escape but as they travel through the rooms everything is not as it seems, a voice mocks the player making them question whether they truly are human or a machine built by them with its own intelligence. The puzzles through out the game are similar to a normal captcha puzzle making it almost impossible for an AI to complete them. By the final room the player must make a choice to go back to the beginning to accept their fate or continue into the unknown world never knowing wether they are fully human or not.

In this project I had control over the engine side, I began by setting up a simple locked camera position with multiple types of interactions. The mouse is shown on screen and all the object where triggered by click events. I made objects the player can inspect, objects that could be picked up and added to the player inventory, objects that could be rotated in different directions, objects that had locks that need solving and finally objects that could be picked up and placed back down however the last object was not needed in the final product and ended up being a debug item in the games files. I created all these objects as master class so I could create children version for when they were needed in game.

Throughout the games production there were many challenges I had to face, for example I had to learn how to correctly import FMOD plugins and use files sent to me by our music producer to be able to correctly place them into the game and create volume sliders that would effect the FMOD files through there banks. I also had a few issues with the inspection interaction as I created this through possessing pawns with fixed camera positions however once the player had received a physical body the player ref became invalid and would no longer allow the player to un possess these object they were inspecting. I also had to think about the order in which the puzzle were attempted as not everyone will interact with things in the same order so I had to come up with solutions to prevent the player from skipping puzzles or soft locking themselves due to the order in which they interacted with the environment.

Furthermore I created custom widget cursors that change depending on the items that are hovered over, this allows the player to understand how the different objects will function even if their not quite sure exactly what the object is. I also was tasked with the player changing from a static camera position to a free form camera during the game, to do this in a way that was smooth and un intrusive to the player we made a apple that could be picked up in front of a mirror, this not only shows the player they have no physical form but allows them to explore more of previous rooms and move around new rooms to find more hidden clues to complete the game. During the apple animation the controls will update and the new control scheme will appear in the key bind that are shown in the top left. The control scheme is shown in a toggle menu I created.

In this project our lead design had created documents for each of the room and flowcharts for how the puzzle should flow together, I followed this very closely to create each room and puzzle making sure each room was done the way the designer intended and the interactions were made to exactly how they were envisioned to play. Due to the game being very thematic this was essential to ensure the game matched the standard the brief had set it too. I created a cinematic ending as the brief in tallied that would send the player through the rooms of the game and back to the beginning before slowly fading to black and ending the game.

The game is available to play on itch.io: