The Omen

The Omen is a very short narrative experience created as the final project from the first year of my advanced diploma. It was created in a group of eight with me and one other programmer working on the project.

In the game you play as Paiku, a child in a small village who discovers an omen when he's instructed by his mother to collect water. The idea behind this project was a slice of a game where you experience a story told between two time periods separated by a tragedy that befalls your village.

Originally I was going to switch between these two time periods by additively loading two Unity scenes which contained the differing assets however it became noticeably slow to load which was jarring to the player so we switched to the alternate assets of present and future being contained within two game objects that toggle off and on as the story progresses.

The camera in this project was designed to behave similarly to the camera in the Link's Awakening remake. As the player walks the camera pans ahead of them to show more of where they are going and less of where they have already been. The final result of this feels fluid and smooth but came with challenges throughout the project with the camera not behaving how I wanted it to or moving with a stutter that was jarring to look at. Eventually I settled on using an invisible game object that moves ahead of the player but not too far and a cinemachine camera which keeps both Paiku and the invisible object within the frame.

I also handled the tracking and progression of the narrative events as well as the HUD which contains a popup objective which automatically shows as it changes as well as appearing when the player holds tab if they miss it or forget where they are going.