Game Developer & Storyteller
FATHOM'S FOUND
An puzzle game about Alien Languages and Materials
Fathom's Found is a puzzle game that aims to get the player to stop playing like a gamer and start thinking like a researcher. The games puzzles involve learning an gesture based alien language to open doors and communicate with the crab-like creatures. For this project we spent 20 weeks crafting a demo that showcases a small slice of the full language and alien's potential for complexity.
TEAM
Fathom Frontiers Inc.
Date: Februari - June 2022
Duration: 20 weeks
Commitment: Full-Time
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Sam Walet: Gameplay & AI Programmer
Erik Oussoren: Game Designer & Artist
Mart van der Hoek: Creative Director & Game Artist
ALIEN AI
Behaviour Trees, Invese Kinematics & State Machines
My main concern for this project was the alien. The tricky part was that the alien was both a game mechanic and a piece of worldbuilding. It needed to be clear and concise as to not confuse the player during puzzles as well as feel like it lived in this world and had it's own thoughts and feelings. Throughout most of our process we worked in short sprints which resulted in many increasingly complex iterations of the alien.
SAMPLING AND SENSORS
A Scrapped but very interesting mechanic
I created a mehcanic which consisted of a gun that could sample pieces of the environtment and shoot them out the again. These samples had properties such as oxygen, temperature and ph that could be compared with a graph on your hud. Every material in the game world had these properties defined through a simple script and could be modularly created to have different interactions like chemical reactions. One material might become radioactive when heated or simply break down or turn into something else entirely. It was a very flexible system but for the scope of this project it could not be implemented in a satisfactory way.