Every System Down is my 1st year of Master's project, made in 3 month in a team of 5. Between video game and escape room, this experience takes place in a real-life installation.
Trapped in the cockpit of a sinking submarine, you need to help the only member of the crew still alive to get you both to the surface alive.
Explore your surroundings, understand the command board and its buttons, levers and valves, look around for clues and help the NPC fulfill their mission: save both of your lives before you run out of time.
You can see more here.
On this project, I took a double role as Game Designer and Programmer. At first, with Guillaume, we worked on the lore and context of the game (which went through many iterations), as the core was defined: the player needs to understand a complex environment, such as a command panel, to solve problems.
Our main inspirations were Please don't touch anything and Stories Untold, for the main mechanics and also the oppressive and stressful ambiance of the second. For the context, we first decided on a science-fiction theme, with the player (still stuck in the cockpit) controlling a robot with their console and giving them simple orders to discover the rest of the ship and correct its malfunctions.
After a few iterations, we settled on a submarine ambiance, and also decided to make the physical part of the game. The goal was to make the player feel tension, claustrophobia, and also feel entitled to the NPC they have to help.
We designed mechanics and mechanisms in parallel, and I implemented them on Arduino as soon as I could, with a cardboard prototype (see pictures on the left and below).
Soon, the game started to make sense: as a ship operator, you would get locked in your cockpit. With headphones, you would hear one of your colleagues, trapped somewhere in the ship, and you could track their position thanks to a screen displaying a map.
You would also have access to a panel of buttons to open and close doors, to a console on an old monitor and a keyboard to enter commands, and to various physical devices to solve puzzles (levers, gauges, valves).
We also faced a bigger problem: we wanted to build all of this, but we didn't have a budget, and as students it would have been impossible for us to pay for it. We soon decided to launch a crowdfunding project, sharing it to our friends and families for a few weeks.
It was a huge success. Thanks to the help of 28 people, we gathered more than 700€, which was nearly double of our original plan. The next two weeks were very intense: we bought everything we needed to make our cockpit, made plans, and built everything from this.
First we built the cockpit itself, a wooden box that was 1.20 wide, 1.80m high and 1.80m long. It was very effective for triggering claustrophobia, which was one of our intentions.
Then we built the command panel, with its buttons and other controls. The old cathodic monitor was meant to be integrated inside it, so we had to cut it right.
In the end, we presented our project to a jury of video game professionals. They were thrilled by the concept of the game, and even if half of the board broke during the tests, it was still a nice and unusual experience for everyone!
This project was a big success. We won Hitsplaytime's Alternative Controller Award (a French contest for student videogames), and we even wanted to take it further: we applied for alt.ctrl.GDC to take the game to the next level... But we didn't make it through the selection phase.
In this project, we experienced working under stress and pressure, managing to keep a good morale in the team while nothing worked like intended 2 days before the presentation, and keeping it together even when you want to throw it all away. It was an experience that made me grow, and I'm proud of it and of my teammates for producing such a great game.