Blink

This assignment aimed to see how well we'd gotten accustomed to Unity throughout the course, but mainly it was testing us on things like code quality, playtesting effectiveness and documentation quality. We had to make a single game mechanic, get it to a complete state, and document our development and playtesting of it.

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Most people picked simple mechanics like double jumps which they could make a few days before the due date, but I always try to push myself and so wanted something more complex. I decided on attempting to recreate the 'Blink' mechanic from Dishonored. This ability makes a marker appear while the mouse button is held down, which moves with the player's view. When the button is released, the player teleports to the marker's position.

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It seemed like something that would be complex enough to push me a bit while still being simple enough to manage at my skill level at the time. I got the teleport marker working as expected, but soon ran into issues after remembering that walls exist - a non-solid marker will go straight through walls and end up in out of bounds areas. Rather than working out how to make the marker stop at walls like in the actual game, I decided to actually work this phasing ability into the design. I used shaders to show whether there was a valid space for the player to teleport into, and I could set up out-of-bounds areas to prevent the player warping out of the level altogether.

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I remember being annoyed with this assignment because the requirements for the documentation were vague. While I believe I met the brief my mark wasn't as high as I would have liked, and I feel it was more down to the vague expectations than failings on the part.

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Click the buttons below to download my documentation and the Unity project for this assignment. It was made in a much older version of Unity though so unfortunately it may not even be compatible with the latest versions.