Escape Marchana

A great effort for year 1 students, especially given only four weeks!

An impressive amount of content—a very large environment with a lot to explore, and a great amount of detail in the environment, some attempts at environmental storytelling, and just a lot of placed objects to differentiate scenes, which is more than can be said for most student Unity games! It's naturally nothing revolutionary, but for a four-week sprint by beginning student game developers, I'm very impressed.

The codebase seems perfectly solid; I'm sure bugs exist like any game, let alone student game, but I couldn't find one. Sometimes collision didn't exist between my player character and enemies, but I chalked that up less as a bug and more just a calculated dev-decision; I didn't think it a problem at all. Of all things I would want changed about the game, proper player-to-enemy collision is about the bottom of my list.

The art assets are fine and serviceable, though the environments are very samey in appearance. I was impressed by the visual level design—how the objects were used to create environments, laid into curious cots and tables and collapsed piping—but my primary fault or gripe with this game is how unilaterally gray it all is. I'd love it if more colors, negative space, lighting, and contrast was used to break up and differentiate the visuals and environments and guide the players—but that's hardly a chilling indictment of the developers' character, as overly samey-looking gray or brown environments is an extremely common problem, even in AAA games with years of development and millions of dollars of funding! So such samey environments in a quick month-long early student project is hardly a big deal.

The other main fault with the game is the game design and UI/UX—which is exactly as expected. Even if more time was given and the developers were more senior at the time, game design and good user experience is deceptively hard and tricky to pull off. Even among senior game designers, most of the good design quality of their games comes from avid playtesting and iteration, not talent or even skill. Knowing how a fresh-faced user will interact with a game takes years and decades of design and playtest experience to really understand, and even then, few to none really claim to be masters of it. Even great game designers have bad UI/UX in their prototypes, only ironed out with that repeated playtesting. This is exceedingly common for beginning designers, students, and games made in a game jam or other rush. If I was asked to list desired changes to this game, it would all start with that UI/UX and game design—pause menu with controls and settings on escape, tutorialization for all controls instead of the side screen, some controls and mechanics like the time slow being either cut or better integrated into the game, changes to the gunplay, timing, reload speeds, rebalancing the guns, allowing the player more counterplay beyond taking cover while reloading to avoid enemy damage instead of just tanking while shooting, more direction, better indication of where the player has already been, etc.—but these issues are exactly what I'd expect from a beginning team's Unity game, especially a student game made in such little time. I don't fault the game much for it, and even still, I don't wish all games to have that perfectly polished UI and good game design, because there's a genuine charm to simple student games like this with their blocky Unity menus and lack of tutorialization. I'm always glad games just like this exist, as they're fun in their own way as an occasional experience. It's a novelty if nothing else.

And judging by how the keycode scribbled on the wall in the screenshot is different than the one I saw in my run, I presume that number is randomly generated? If so, that's a brilliant touch! That seems like a no-duh move, but I can't remember a single other 3D game I've played that's ever done that before, where the password / pin number, etc. you find in the environment to open a door / chest is random each playthrough so it can't be cheated. I can think of so many big-standard AAA games—even some of my favorites like Dishonored and The Last of Us—and they don't do that touch, even though it would be so easy, especially because in those games the passwords/passcodes are just communicated as text in reading handouts, instead of environment textures. That's honestly given me something to think about, and I'm going to stow that lesson away as a neat trick. It's very rare that a game gives me a trick or idea like that to really take away from it permanently; that's really awesome. Escape Marchana earns good marks in my book for that alone.