FACTORY RESET

A single-player first-person puzzle game about a magnetic robot on a quest to find their way home through a Soviet-inspired cyberpunk world. Use your magnetic hands and feet to push and pull your way through three different levels!

Released: July 2021
Developed: August 2020 - June 2021
Team:

• Joseph Henry Stadolnik IV (myself) - Gameplay Programmer & Designer
• Christian Orion Adler - Artist
• Raymond Dolan - Gameplay Programmer & Audio Lead
• Elizabeth Kirschner - Accessible Design Lead

Tools I Used:

• Unity HDRP
• GitHub
• Gimp
• Blender

Programming Language: C#

About:
This game was created as our Major Qualifying Project at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which is a capstone project demonstrating our abilities in our academic majors. In my case, it satisfied my degree requirements for Computer Science and for IMGD* Technology.
The game had a strong emphasis on accessibility, with many features and design decisions intended to make the game playable by a larger audience. The menu options provided included:

• Remappable controls (with controller support)
• Adjustable look sensitivity
• Adjustable subtitles
• Various resolution and display settings
• Customizable volume levels
• The option to change between hold and toggle control modes
• The option to hide the re-orientation animation (to reduce motion sickness)

Accessibility was also a factor in the core design of the game: we avoided requiring multiple simultaneous actions or any sort of time pressure to make the game more accessible for people with cognitive or motor disabilities, and we chose red and blue for the polarity colors since they are distinguishable with all forms of dichromatic vision.
For more detail on all aspects of the game, please refer to our paper on the project.
* Interactive Media and Game Development

My Role: Gameplay Programmer & Designer
I was primarily in charge of designing and implementing the movement mechanics of Factory Reset as well as the game's moment-to-moment gameplay. I also created the game's heads-up display and some visual effects.
My specific achievements on this project included:

• Implementing the magnetic feet mechanic, which lets players pull themselves to polarized surfaces and re-orient to stand and walk along them.
• Implementing a custom player controller leveraging Unity's physics with support for arbitrary gravity direction.
• Designing the low-level gameplay and puzzles of all three levels in the game.
• Designing and implementing the full city skyway level, including endlessly scrolling randomized buildings and idly flying vehicles that shift position based on player proximity.
• Designing, drawing, and implementing the heads-up display.
• Implementing a custom subtitle and cutscene system.
• Implementing contextual hand movement and actions entirely through scripting.
• Creating flying car thruster visual effects.

Other Notes:

• Factory Reset won the 2021 Provost's MQP Award from Worcester Polytechnic Institute's IMGD Department for being an outstanding Major Qualifying Project.
• Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our team worked remotely for the entire development process of Factory Reset.

Links:
itch.io
Project Paper