📺 Clikr

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about

A survival shooter in an electronic body horror world. Made as part of a game development course by a six-person team in five weeks. Playable in browser, or downloadable for Windows. I handled the user interface (including implementation) and audio.

ui

I took care of the UI side of the game, and I planned for it to be a core element of the world fantasy since the world was based on old tech. The UI was to be snappy and responsive, and full of draw and charisma.

Starting with the crosshair and interaction prompt, I wanted them to draw the player’s attention, especially since it wasn’t immediately apparent what the player could interact with in the world (such as shooting TVs with their hand). I added motion and colour when actions were available.

The inventory wanted to be visible at all times since it contained only two distinct kinds of items which were both pertinent to gameplay at all times. I made tween-based animations for receiving and using items because I needed to handle keyframes dynamically.

Towards the end of the project, the diegetic battery indicator fell out of the domain of the artists, and I needed to add a HUD element for it. I went with a “retro” style (this hurts to type), making sure to draw the player’s attention when they were out of power, and added a bit of flair to the recharge animation.

I styled the settings menu after a CRT TV with a teletext-like program displayed. I added some light bulbs blinking in random intervals for fun.

There’s also the main menu. The background moves back and forth on several layers, and some of the elements activate on a timer.

fonts

I made a pixel font called Recluse for the game with both a regular and italics style, both with full ASCII support.

code

My contribution to the codebase was focused on implementing the UI and HUD. I think the most interesting contribution was having to make a custom settings slider for volume in order to fit with the aesthetic.

tech

The idea was to make a CRT-like shader to apply to the HUD and UI elements of the game. Originally I was planning on applying a post-processing effect to an entire layer but after delving deeper into the details of the Unity render pipeline I wasn’t able to find a way to pull that off for the UI layer, as it was added last and all effects applied thereafter would also influence the base game view. In the end, I made a shader and applied it to each element individually, and only had to introduce a few workaround variables (such as accounting for element rotation so that scanlines stayed horizontal to the camera) to get a satisfactory result.

Here’s some better shots:

audio

I made a short looping background track titled Silicon Heaven for the game. The goal was to make it somewhat calm, peaceful, and mildly unnerving at the same time, while adding the smallest touch of whimsy with a specific melody section.

I also created some synthetic sound effects for the enemies and objects in the game, since they wanted to have a distinct unnatural feel.

retrospection

what did i do right?

I am quite happy with how the CRT shader worked out, I got it looking pretty much exactly the way I wanted. The HUD elements feel good to mess around with and I often spend some time just watching them do their thing. The settings menu turned out quite cute as well. I think my choice for the UI accent colour fit well to introduce visual interest and identity into the game.

what would i do different?

Music’s a bit weak. It was delegated to the end of the work period, so I couldn’t quite get it to the level of polish I wanted. Horror music is very specific, it is often quite subtle, but that means it’s all the more important to get everything included in it to pull its weight 100%. I think the track works fine, but needed more time to explore more options and instruments, and additional planning of how exactly it should make the player feel.