Noel Grünbaum – Game Designer

Small Steps (Working Title) is a side project I’m working on along with my current internship at House of How. In it you light up a dark world by solving puzzles.

Technical

Since the game revolves around casting light and the lack of light I will highlight my implementation of the detection of this.

It is technically possible to directly get the lumen or similar unit cast upon a blueprint but it is unnecessarily expensive for my use case since I only really care about proximity to a light source. I chose to do it the cleanest way I could imagine which is to message an interface I implement on all “lightables” (blueprints which can be lit) and then detect these lightables in the proximity of light sources.

BPFL_Lighting Weak

BPFL_Lighting Strong

Strong is the exact same as weak except for the strong message being sent.

Explanation:

1. The blueprint calling this function passes various info like a reference to itself, the radius of the light source, and whether debug info should be shown for that message. Then there is a sphere overlap check for any actors inside the radius which are of the type “Lightables“.
2. For every lightables actor a line trace is shot out to check if there are any worldstatic or worlddynamic actors in the way. This is to ensure there is line of sight from the light to the lightable.
3. Any of the actors which were discovered by the sphere overlap and could be reached by the line trace are messaged with the weak light message.

1B and 2B are debug related comments and checks.

Design

The core principle is withholding information with darkness to make otherwise simple puzzles interesting. Some examples/ideas/concepts are:

• Turning on different lights to see which combination accomplishes a give goal.
• Using your own weak light to light up lightbulbs to open doors with their strong light.
• Using different color lights to set up chains the player have to create. (Undecided on colored lights at the moment)
• etc.

Intro Room:

Below is a video of a simple intro room introducing the concept of lamps lighting up goal actors completing the level as well as the concept of strong and weak light sources. Debug traces are shown in the video to clarify what is lighting up what.

Conclusion

I initially started this project just to have a guaranteed new project for my portfolio since my work at House of How is under NDA, but found it to be just as rewarding as a much needed creative outlet where I could do my own thing.