Shore Leave

Overview

Shore Leave is a short relaxing puzzle game about gathering your friends and some foods for a picnic. Set on Pīniki Shores you follow Robin, a cat who has just come home and is excited to see their friends again, exploring the island and meeting all it’s residents. Solve puzzles in 2D to unlock different areas of the island and to collect different foods to ensure you have the best picnic possible!

What did i work on?

As lead developer I developed several full areas of the game, some key parts are:

• The Scene Management system, allowing the seamsless transition between the 3D main scene and the 2D puzzles. The system is built for efficient resource management and seamless gameplay.
• The Interaction system, efficiently and scalably allowing custom interactions to be implemented.
• The Dialogue system, implemented utilising YarnSpinner, allowing dialogue to be easily written and implemented seamlessly. It features various customisation options per character such as: Colour scheme, speech bubble positioning, and per character font.
• The Camera system, built for a smooth camera experience. The system utilises camera zones with when entered by the player will smoothly move the camera to the desired position and rotation.
• The Audio system. I developed a complete audio system utilising FMOD allowing for music to play, multiple sound effects to play concurrently and efficiently, and sound effects to be localised to specific areas. This can be seen with the ocean’s ambience.
• Both the 2D and 3D character controllers, giving responsive and nice feeling controls to the player.
• Game UI. I implemented the games immersive and novel pause menu as well as all functionality within it.
• Events System. I implemented the games event system, allowing for changes to occur after dialogue, puzzle completion, or any other arbitrary event.

Graphics

In addition to the prior mentioned work I additionally developed several important aspects of the games graphics:

• Ground shader. The entire island utilises a single, triplanar mapping, shader which allows the island to be textured correctly from all sides and covers the top with sand or grass (and their variants of a pathway) depending on the area.
• Water shader. The toon water shader was implemented to aid the games overall aesthetic. It features several customisable parameters which could be fine tuned to match the scene.
• Post processing. The game features several post processing effects to achieve a greater look. Colour correction and bloom are utilised to give the game a more tropical and warm feeling while fog is used to make the island truly feel as though its far out in the ocean. In addition to these two the game’s customisable pixellated look gives is a nostialgic and comfy feeling, aiding the games relaxing atmosphere.