Blogs - vivek257

I think that a decent chunk of Game design is about conveying information to the player in as clear and concise a manner as you possibly can. First person stealth presents us with a familiar set of challenges in doing this. The clearer the information, the easier it becomes for the player to navigate the level and make plans. In thief for e.g. the light gem allows the player to determine how visible they are. In graveyard of thieves we used several similar ideas to convey information to the player,

The Proximity Ring:

Whenever the player looks at a patrolling enemy in the game the proximity ring pops up for a short amount of time. It tells the player what the Sight Radius of the enemy is. The proximity ring changes color to yellow when the player is inside the ring and to red when the enemy spots the player.

This feature could probably have been a vision cone instead of what I ended up implementing. It might not be immediately clear to the player that the green circle drawn around the enemy is a sight radius.

Alarms:

There is another pair of indicators that tell the player they have been spotted by the enemy. One is a red exclamation mark above the enemy. The other is an aural cue, you hear an audio clip of the enemy saying that they’ve spotted an intruder.

Again there should probably have been more clarity here, I could have added another audio cue for when the enemy gets suspicious and tries to look for the player. The suspicious state ends up being pretty nebulous because of this lack of feedback. I think I’ll end up putting a question mark above the enemies head eventually to make it clearer that they’re looking for the player.

Gadgets:

There are several gadgets hidden in every level for the player to use. These gadgets enable the player to evade enemies ,avoid detection and solve puzzles.

This was the first game I worked on alone, I learned a lot about systems design in the process, I made a lot of mistakes as well, These posts are an attempt to catalog what I was trying to do and how well I managed to do it.

The game is on Steam Greenlight ! Check it out and vote for it if you like it.

My name’s Vivek, I’m a Game Designer/Scripter. I’ve been working in the games industry for 6 years now. I’ve done QA work on the Baconing the third game in the Deathspank series, I’ve also worked as a game designer on AAA games like Sleeping Dogs. I moved back home to India from Canada in 2012 and worked as a Mission Designer/Scripter on Tryst, In 2013. I quit my job and spent a while trying to figure out what to do next.

I started working seriously on a game in mid 2014. I’d had a few ideas that I’d been kicking around and I finally settled on one. The idea I started working on back in June ‘14 and what I released this week seem somewhat like distant relatives to me, they might be from the same family tree but they have very little in common with one another.

The idea at the core of Graveyard of Thieves was about interacting with the environment by making all interaction dependent on visual contact i.e. you have to look at an object in the environment to interact with it. I set out wanting to build a stealth game with an interesting story, where the player didn’t carry any gadgets on their person but used gadgets embedded in the environment to evade & distract enemies and use the same gadgets to solve puzzles. How successful I was remains to be seen.

This Blog will chronicle(retrospectively of course) the game I set out to make, the game I ended up finally making, the mistakes I made and the lessons I learned along the way. It should be an interesting journey and I hope you join me for it !!

The game is also up on Steam Greenlight !! Please vote for us there