Reconnected

Reconnected is an exploratory puzzle game. In it, the player is a small core that seeks to reconnect the power and systems to an ancient, abandoned settlement through the use of several detachable robotic appendages. With these the player can run, jump, pick boxes, repower old devices, and rewire power systems. Eventually, after turning on lights and enquiring more parts, they will be able to totally repower parts of the settlement.

Joining The team:

I joined this team part way through their development process as a Technical Designer and was expected to act as both Game Designer and Game Programmer. As Game Designer, I designed aspects of a level and all the games sounds. As Game Programmer, I was expected to implement the levels I made, develop small pieces of code, and create the sound system.

Sound Design:

For Reconnected’s sound design, I started by writing documentation for how the game’s sound should feel. I checked with the team to determine their vision for the game so I could make sound that would invoke feelings that work with the game’s atmosphere. I determined the game was supposed to feel like a benign mystery. Basically, the player should wonder why or how people were no longer here, but it should be interesting, not horrifying. This meant the background music and sounds had to set the ambiance for what the player was currently doing. However, the ambiance would be different if the player was reconnecting a forgotten part of the settlement versus wandering through forgotten streets, so I had to create a sounds system to play different background sounds and music depending on where the player was, or what they were doing at the time. Finally, the sound effects had to be realistic to sci-fi as the player was playing a small robot core in an abandoned settlement.  

Music switches: 

Music swathes were created with the intent to have area based sounds that fade in and fade out. For this, I made sound switch points. These were small invisible colliders that, once the player moved through them, would add music to one of the audio sources that controlled the game’s music. Specifically, they would add it to the one that had its volume set to zero. This audio source’s volume would slowly raise as the audio for the previous music would lower. In this way I was able to create area based fade in fade out music.

Audio Areas:

Using the same system for the music switches with a collider that the player could walk into I created a system that would simple play a sound on loop as long as a player was in sided the area. This helped me create sounds for environmental wind effects.

Sound Triggers:

Sound triggers as above used an invisible colliders, how every they played their sounds once the player entered or left them. They could even be marked for whether they would play once or any time the player walked in them. These sound triggers let me set up effects like the player robot beeping when they got to new part of the level.

Levels

During my time on the team I became responsible for designing and implementing two exploratory puzzles in Reconnected. The two puzzle where a storage area puzzle that helped the learn how to use their box moving arm, and a roof access puzzle that gave the player access the roof of the level area.

Storage Area:

Roof Access: