Daylight

Project Type

Game – Parkour/Puzzle

Timeline

January 29 – 30th, 2022

Primary Role(s)

Game Designer, Blueprint Developer

Tools

Unreal Engine 4

Daylight is a single-player, parkour game created for Global Game Jam 2022. The short project was completed in less than 2 days from ideation to packaged game. Following the theme of “Duality” as set by the game jam, Daylight focuses on the contrast between day and night and consists of two different levels.

Built in Unreal Engine 4, Daylight provided a strong foundation for rapid prototyping and development under time pressure. My roles in this project include: gameplay design, Blueprint development, environment design, and UI design.

Project Download:

Parkour your way to victory through day and night. Tread carefully amongst the debris and watch your step! Time your hops; reach the top.

Details

When coming up with Daylight’s concept, I knew I wanted a simple game that requires a player’s mechanical skill. Due to the 2-day time constraint and various other factors, we needed to limit the scope of the game and make it use simple mechanics but still provide a challenge. Thus, I, along with two fellow game designers, designed Daylight to focus on a player’s movement skills, timing, and creative thinking. Each “obstacle” in the game is different from the last, giving players a challenging yet low-stakes experience. Although the probability of failure is high at first, the game encourages players to iterate through attempts in order to win.

All objects (excluding torches and fire VFX) were first blocked out using Unreal’s BSPs. They were then modified to fit the context and primitives were used to replace many of them. The object scripts were implemented next followed by the textures.

Object Scripting

Interactions between the player and the environment, such as stepping on a platform, hitting a switch, etc. were all scripted using Unreal Engine’s Blueprint system. I created the scripts to transform objects in the level either automatically or on an event (such as player collision).

Button trigger Blueprint

Cylinder transform Blueprint

Day-night cycle blueprint snippet

Night

Morning

Afternoon

Time Of Day

Besides the objects in the level, I also wanted to make the environment match the theme of “Duality.” To do this, I implemented an automatic time-of-day system that changes the sun’s position and the resulting atmosphere’s lighting.

User Interface

The UI for Daylight didn’t need to be overly complex or detailed. I created a simple start and “Controls” screen UI that suffice for the timeframe of the project. I made sure to include the keybind to open the “Controls” screen on the start UI for ease.

Start Widget

Controls Widget

Difficulties

The main difficulty for this project was limiting the scope and completing all the necessary parts in the 2-day timeframe. To increase speed, I turned many static meshes on the map(cubes, cylinders, etc.) directly into Blueprint objects rather than creating new Blueprints and attaching new meshes to them.