Systems to Shine (The Newton Mystery)
Dalton Hutchinson
Bio
Hi! My name is Dalton and I’m a double major in Interactive Multimedia and Computer Science at The College of New Jersey. I’m really excited about video games and have spent my four years at TCNJ working on projects from game jam games made in a weekend, to a 2D platformer fully released on Steam. I also have an interest and experience in various computer science topics from my computer science degree including computer networking, algorithms, data structures, and software engineering.
Project Description
For my thesis project I decided to team up with a few other classmates to create our own video game titled, Newton Mystery. It’s a 2D puzzle platformer adventure game where you play as a group of friends who hunt down monsters who have gone berserk and solve the mystery behind these ominous occurrences. My role on this project consists mainly of programming and development for the game. More specifically I’ve been focusing on working with shaders, our back end systems, and polish. I’ve also split the gameplay programming with our other programmers, Patrick Merklee and Josh Shoenfelt. I’m responsible for the movement controllers for our playable characters, and the ability behavior for our characters Mac and Lemon.
Play the Game
Try out an early demo version of our game on our itch.io page below. Steam page coming soon!
Some of the Work I’ve Done
Gameplay Programming
We split the gameplay programming among the 3 coders on our team. For example, I’m responsible for the movement controllers, Mac’s abilities, Lemon’s abilities, and shooting in the bullet hell.
Programming Systems
I’m also responsible for many of the backend systems in our game, such as the dialogue systems, save system, and book collection system. For the dialogue systems we're utilizing the Yarn Spinner and Text Animator Unity packages, customized to our own needs.
Polish and Shaders
I’ve worked on a lot of polish and front end effects for our game as well. The gif on the left shows off one of the shaders I created for the dream sequences that Mac sees. It uses a normal map and emission to apply a glow effect and change in alpha. I’ve also worked on polishing up UI, camera shake effects, and implementing animations.
Making a Game Within a Game
The Newton Mystery is a 2D platformer at heart, but while developing we thought we might be able to spice up the gameplay loop with some sections with different gameplay. So in the second act of our game, Tess goes back in time and fights in the Occult Wars, Enter the Gungeon style. We’ve taken some inspiration from It Takes Two as well here and the context of playing a bullet hell inside of another game, makes it all the more exciting.