Agoraphobia
Project Summary
After arriving at college, Joyce struggles with a yet-undiagnosed panic disorder while attempting to find direction and acceptance among their peers.
Their panic disorder distorts the world around them, rendering an otherwise friendly world overwhelming and horrific.
In search of respite, they stumble across their campus's art studio and begins to make peace with themself.
Environmental Art
During development, I fell in love with environment art. Putting together believable spaces appeals to me so much. Early in development I strictly modeled environments in the game to reflect those in the real world. I later realized that warping geometry does wonders to disorient and discomfort the player, which was the goal in the "panic" segments.
Models
Agoraphobia was a great opportunity to continue practicing low-poly 3d modeling. The process was kind of improvised, with me just modeling objects as I thought about what would be in each environment. I still consider myself a beginner modeler, but below are some models I'm particularly proud of.
Development Process
Agoraphobia began development as a prototype set on a train using a "portal" Unity demo found on GitHub. I realized about a month into development that the project was lacking direction, so I effectively started from scratch, carrying over only the basic portal code and the Yarn Spinner dialogue engine. I decided to pivot the project away from puzzles and towards narrative, basing the story on a semi-autobiographical account of learning to cope with my own mental health struggles.
Above all else, development was a learning process. I went into the project not knowing the first thing about 3D modeling, environment design, or narrative writing but I completed the project feeling much more confident in these disciplines. Additionally, development was a good way to strengthen my programming skills. I typically rely on Unity documentation and services such as Stack Overflow to reference when programming, but utilizing libraries like the portal code from GitHub and Yarn Spinner meant that I had to rely on myself, as documentation was either minimal or non-existent for these libraries. This proved frustrating at first, but this trial-by-fire method of programming undoubtedly improved my skills.
Time Management was another part of development this project helped me improve in. For the most part I was the sole developer, and therefore it was up to me whether or not the game made its February 1st deadline. I found myself without employment over winter break, so I decided I would commit myself completely to finishing Agoraphobia. This proved to be essentially a full-time job. Most time was spent fixing bugs or wrapping my head around systems in Unity I had never touched before.
Agoraphobia was the first time I had ever tried to do something creative with Unity's lighting engine. I had watched several videos on Unity's new rendering pipeline and all the interesting effects it allowed, and in order to implement such features I upgraded the project to Unity's new pipeline. Unfortunately the new pipelines were incompatible with a core feature of the game and undoing the upgrade was impossible. This taught me the importance of backups and version control. Luckily I was using a Git repository and could roll back the changes. If I had not done this the project would have been scrapped.
Additionally, I learned more about how to successfully impress an emotion onto a player, such as fear or relief. I accomplished this by messing with the lighting and geometry during the "panic" sections of the game, along with creating a more oppressive soundscape.
This was the first time I ever released one of my projects publicly online, which was a terrifying prospect. I struggle with convincing myself my work is worth anything at all, and having others perceive my work on their own stressed me out to no end. Nevertheless, I submitted it to the Independent Game Festival and posted it on itch.io for anyone to see. I've been told that the process of publicly releasing one's own projects gets easier each time, and I look forward to it getting easier.