A Small Issue is an open-world RPG story game based on retro games like Pokemon. Our goal was to create a story that encapsulates our views and emotions towards AI development. We want the player to interpret our these through their own experience in the immersive world of A Small Issue.
Our game follows the story of the player in the town of Pixelton. After exploring the town a bit, the player is exposed to various characters and events of the greatest significance. You can play the game for yourself here.
We built the project in Unity fully from scratch, primarily using scripts in C-Sharp. That means the logic of every single feature and gameplay event in the entire game was coded by hand during this hackathon. It also means that the entire map, including all interiors, were hand designed from scratch. We used Unity, VSCode and Git for collaboration. When faced with challenges, we found YouTube tutorials and read through documentation.
We are incredibly proud of the aesthetics of the world we've created. The sprites are majority hand-drawn by us using a pixel editor; other graphics were pulled from open-source platforms and all of the music was created by us using AI music-generation software. We added both an introduction and ending cutscene with exposition to give Pixelton more personality. We believe that a user playing the game could fully immerse themselves back into the 80s and 90s from where we took our inspirations. We worked hard to storyboard the game's plot, messaging, and mood prior to the game and with significant revisions in order to deliver a satisfying, clean, complete, and emotionally weighty project.
The primary challenge of the game was coordinating the massive codebase we were working in. We are passing a significant number of objects, instances, variables, etc. between files, scenes, and states, and keeping track of all of this without introducing significant bugs was a worthy challenge. Another major hurdle we had to deal with was camera movements within the game. We wanted dialogue boxes through world interaction, moving NPCs, and fade and shake effects. The scope of the project tended to fluctuate throughout the design process, but once we finalized the overworld design, we were able to come together and agree on a polished storyboard.
Before we created A Small Issue, the three of us had no experience utilizing C-sharp or manipulating 2D sprites. Now, we've managed to create a game that tracks flags and events, contains NPCs with various lines of dialogue, and even some cutscenes. We even managed to create multiple fades and personalized graphics for the game that cannot be found elsewhere. We all got much better at game design, level design, story writing, and large-scale collaboration.
In the future, we would like to add more levels and challenges to A Small Issue. We were thinking about expanding the environment by building computer interactions where the player could potentially utilize their full keyboard. We also think that we could build off the emotional story beats we were trying to build by including more interactive NPCs that the player would recognize i.e. friends, family, etc...
Made with Unity 2022.3.25f