#doppelscope

Doppelscope was my thesis game in my undergrad program at the University of the Arts, Zurich. It's an abstract puzzle game where you have to bring each world into balance by making the right connections. Even tough the game received the very low grade D, it won the Unity Awards 2009 in the category Best Visual Design.

The game has gone trough a lot of iterations. More so on the visual side then gameplay wise. I'll try to write down some of these and the current issues I'm having with the game.

In the beginning I wanted to create a very dynamic world contained in a small space. A place where the player can change certain parameters and watch the changes happening in the world. I also wanted to create a very unique and stylized visualization. Something I had a pretty clear picture of in my mind.

What I was totally unsure about tough was how to do the player interaction and what kind of story the game should have. I knew I wanted to keep the interaction as simple and obvious as possible. But I wasn't too sure about everything.

One of the earlier prototypes had a third-person styled gameplay where you control a protagonist that can switch between two views (visions) of the world. One in which he can influence things and one where the actual objects are displayed. Here are some screenshots:

Now you may think: Wait a minute! this sounds and looks awesome! Why did you change it?

And the answer is very simple: I realized I lacked the time to do it properly because I would've had to model and animate the character on top of all the other work. I worked alone and did everything myself. Since I'm not a very good programmer I didn't wanted to waste my time trying to make something very complicated. We only had like two full months of time for our thesis game. Also I felt that this wasn't the right way to portray the game world and that the movement interactions we're too complicated for some people. Or in other words: why make something very complicated when you can make it a lot easier to play. At least thats what I thought back then.

So I searched for a solution and got inspired by the art of Josh Keyes:

Some of his drawings are like a scientific cut-outs of certain elements of our daily life. Arranged and displayed in an artifical way. So thats where the cubical world comes from. I wanted to an actual 3D mask that would've allowed me to fade stuff in and out of the cube bordes. But I didn't find a good way to do it in Unity. Note: time versus complexity.

Another thing that changed was how the player switches between the two worlds. The world is completely mirrored vertically. Just like a perfect reflection on calm water. The player switches views by simply rotating the camera to the other side. There are some additional effects when passing over the horizon to emphasize the transition.

The view on the mirrored side:

Which brings me to one of the core problems with Doppelscope: The primary gameplay mechanic of changing the connections between things.

In the first prototype players could change connections by holding a button which pulled the nearest connection towards their character and then walking to a new connection point. Upon releasing the button the connections would simply search for the nearest possible connection point and use it as their new target.

In the final version connections always flow to their target point unless a possible connection is within range. Players change the connection by dragging the target object towards a new connection point on a 2D plane in 3D space. Which is a very bad idea because stuff like this is only obvious to you if you've worked in 3D before. What usually happened was that players didn't get why they could move the target object only in a certain way or that it will stick to the closest connection point. This also gets increasingly difficult if the camera is at an odd angle, and sometimes its very hard to tell the position of the target object in relation to the connector you want to drag it to.

Now while most of these things sounds very simple and logically if someone explains them to you they evidently are very cryptic. I mean I wanted the game to be that way initially. I wanted players to experiment and find out how the game works by themselves without some big tutorial text explaining everything. But what I realized was that only a few players actually enjoyed figuring it out and that my interaction methods really were way to cryptic. For example: it makes sense that trees need water to grow right? But it doesn't make sense that I have to drag a floating ball towards the tree so it'll get water. I realized that making these things as obvious as possible is pretty damn hard especially when you're trying to create something unique. None the less I still believe the core concept of Doppelscope could be a fun experience and I am currently working on a prototype for iOS devices. So stay tuned for that. :)

To conclude this pretty lengthy post here is a complete play trough video of the game:

As well as the original documentation for my school back from 2009: DOPPELSCOPE_Documentation_2009.pdf