Felix Marcoux

Échappe au DM

An exfiltration game inside a Dungeons & Dragons game

— PROJECT NAME

Échappe au DM


— ROLE

Programmer

Scriptwriter

Storyboarder


— DATE

January – April 2022


— SOFTWARES USED

Unity

Wwise

Échappe au DM is a game prototype made as part of a game design course at UQAT. The player plays Renegus, a character from a Dungeons & Dragons player who tries to escape the vilain's castle at the end of a campaign. However, his escape is influenced by the interactions of the player with his dungeon master in the real world.


In parallel to this prototype, we also had to create a minute-long animatic that could be inserted in our gameplay.


This project was created by a team of 6 people (myself included) with the Unity engine:


You can watch a demo of the game played by Tommy Gaudet on his Twitch channel Douteux.tv.

You can also download the game on itch.io and play yourself here.


Narrative design

  • I came to this project after its initial ideation by Roman, Julien and Clement, with most of the story already set in stone. Me, Maxime and David situated our animatic somewhere between 2 levels rather than at the beginning or end of the game.


I took charge of the script and it was a nice challenge to produce a proper script from the narration of a project I knew little about prior to my involvement. I tried to add a touch of absurd humor to hint that despite conflicts that may incur, this is all just a big game of make-believe.


Since the level after our animatic introduced obstacles based on interactions between player and dungeon master, I also had the challenge of hinting at this mechanic in the script. In the end, the team like it and we could start on actually creating the animatic.

Despite having no particular talent in drawing, me, Maxime and David did our best to draw in the style of the “Dungeon of Naheulbeuk” series. That was to stay consistent with the style used by the other half of the team and their own animatic.


I ended up drawing most of the scenes and camera shots, notably those showing the dungeon master. I had to heavily reuse many of the poses I drew and draw my hands in different angles.


The final result is not too shabby considering our lack of experience and our time constraints.

Cinématique finale

Programming

  • During development, I mainly focused on the player’s controls. These included:
  • - Basic movement
  • - Dodging
  • - Lurking
  • - Knocking out enemies
  • - Slingshot shooting (including ammunition)
  • - Scavenging (enemies or chests)


The sound detection developed by Maxime helped me greatly for the lurking and slingshot shooting.


In addition to implementing the all of the player’s controls, I also integrated the animations of the player and every enemy, thanks to an asset pack Roman bought and slightly modified. I also had a hand in adding many sounds in the game thanks to Wwise.


Finally, I also helped the best I could to help my colleagues debug throughout the development.

Lurking

Knocking out an enemy and scavenging

Dodging

One of my most important contribution to the game was a modular event system, which allowed us to trigger different actions based on different trigger types (overlapping a zone, hitting a specific key, or randomly triggered). This system was coroutine-based and possible events notably included:


  • - Triggering a dialogue
  • - Moving the camera to a location
  • - Activate/deactivate another trigger box
  • - Making an object appear on the map

  • Multiple events could be triggered by a single trigger with a delay to each of them. Since I was relatively new to the Unity engine, I am still proud of it despite its flaws and its bulk.


It’s undoubtedly the most complex element I created for the whole prototype, but it proved useful to me and my team during the whole development to really convey our game’s vision.

This project was one of my first experiences of cooperation on a large-scale project with Unity. It’s also the first time any of my games has been shown to a large audience. It still has flaws (the last level’s difficulty is notably way too high), but I’m still proud of the resulting prototype and the story we managed to tell through it. All in all, I gained valuable experience from this project.