Project Title
Project Type
Comrade Baby
Play a communist baby, called to reclaim the Motherland from capitalist corruption by none other than the spirit of Joseph Stalin himself.
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Liberate the workers
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Send your enemies to the goo goo gulag
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Make Papa Stalin proud
Winner of Russia Today's Game of the Year Award for 3 Consecutive Years
"This is the best FPS I've played in years... no, in my entire life! Please let me go now!"
-Michael Smith
"I swear, I love this game! Please don't hurt my family!"
-Jane Anderson
TOOLS:
Unity Engine, Photoshop
LENGTH:
3 Weeks
GENRE:
First-person shooter
Overview
The main goal of this project was to create a mission-centered FPS that would support basic exploration, progression, and narrative elements. I wanted to capture as much of the end-to-end experience as possible within the three weeks I had for the project. For the mission design, I wanted the player’s actions to create a visible impact on the game environment. World design as immersion is a big part of the player experience for me and I try to work it into as much of what I design as I can.
Missions
Make Papa Stalin proud or turn your parents in for their crimes
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If you 'make Papa Stalin proud' you get the gun earlier
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If you send them to the goo goo gulag, they'll bribe the guards to escape & you'll have to face them later
Get your paycheck at the factory, explore the factory
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Players pick up their paycheck, getting $100 to spend at the revolutionary operations store.
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Players have the option to shoot the boss (but they are later replaced with another boss).
Complete Revolutionary Missions
After exploring the factory you find a revolutionary operations base, where you meet Comrade Petyr. Comrade Petyr will direct you to the available missions on the bulletin board. As you complete more quests, the base gets more populated and has more propaganda posters. You also get more weapons upgrades and items in the base store.
Unionize the Factory
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Before: The boss walks around and yells at the workers. The workers complain about unfair working conditions.
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After: The boss stays in his office and the workers thank you for helping them unionize.
Liberate the Fields
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Before: Factory workers complain about being hungry, can't afford lunch on their salary (pre-unionized), can barely afford lunch on their salary (post-unionized).
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After: The workers happily take lunch breaks and the farm workers thank you for liberating the farm.
Liberate Communications
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Before: Radios in the world play commercials and new propaganda against comrade baby.
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After: Radios play revolutionary music & new updates on the progress of the revolution (FarmCorp has been broken up, Factory workers have unionized).
Overthrow the President
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For the final mission, players speak to Nadia who instructs them to obtain a disguise (purchased in the operations store with money earned from completing missions) and a press pass, acquired from the communications tower.
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If you attempt to enter the Kremlin without these things, the guard will suggest what players need to gain entrance.
Programming
This was my first time building a quest system and creating a project with multiple gameplay systems. Previously I had created prototypes for individual systems, (crafting, shooting, platforming, etc), which didn't require complex game architecture. I tried to create scripts that were modular and passed object references through manager scripts that held all relevant reference types. In a future project, I would build the components to be more modular & not require object references to each other – using scriptable objects
When I created this project, I created game objects for each quest, subquest children of that quest object, and a quest manager with all the object references for the quests. For modular quest pieces, like travel to trigger volumes, they had their own scripts to trigger quest functions matching the game object reference on the quest script.
In the future, I would create quests as scriptable objects & give any quest objects a reference to the scriptable object on an object interaction script. That way, the pieces would be fully modular, and the quest objects would check the scriptable object list of currently active quests. If the quest objects match, then the game object interaction script would compare the interaction type to the quest objective type.
Takeaways
In a future project, I would build the quest components to be more modular & not require object references to each other, using scriptable objects and unity messaging instead.