Closed Circuit is a first- and third-person puzzle adventure game demo developed by me and my
friend and fellow game developer and QA professional Dan
Ahern in Unity, under our
Halfpoint Games label.
The game follows an unnamed security guard at a science facility which becomes overrun with robots; the
guard is trapped in his security booth and must pilot a janitorial drone through the facility to rescue
other scientists and escape,
as well as discover what caused the outbreak.
The gameplay loop is intended to alternate between the third-person janitorial drone being piloted
through the facility, upgraded with various tools and weapons, and rescuing scientists trapped by the
robot outbreak. Meanwhile, the first-person
player can solve puzzles from inside the security booth.
The game is currently on indefinite hold, as Tin Hearts became close to
release during a critical stage of its development while Closed Circuit was in progress.
What did I do?
Dan and I shared most responsibilities relating to the game's production as we both have backgrounds in
C# programming. One of my key contributions, however, was the development of the AI used by the game's
enemies. The AI uses a
node-based finite state machine system I developed in the node system framework XNode to track the enemy's state - whether to follow its
default patrol route, whether to chase the player,
or whether to be on high alert - Unity's NavMesh to pursue the player when alerted, and Sensor Toolkit,
a Unity asset, to handle player detection.
I also built the various player controllers in the game, for the player, the drone, and the cinematic
controller (see the video above; the player still has control of the first person camera during
cutscenes, but their rotation is limited and they
cannot move around).
We used Jira for our issue tracking and quality assurance, and Confluence for our systems documentation,
which we wrote collaboratively.