Interactive Game Poster

Play the game here!

Walkthrough 

There’s not much to detail in the walkthrough for my interactive poster. The main interaction is experiencing the pseudo-3D world I have created. There is a spooky background track playing and occasionally other sounds will play. There is a sound effect for walking, with a chance to play a creaking sound. Similarly, there is also a random chance at any time to play a growl sound effect. There are no actual enemies in this poster, the sound effects are entirely for mood and ambiance. The player moves around using either WASD or the arrow keys. 

Design Goals 

Resident Evil is a horror game, and I wanted that feeling of dread to come across in my interactive work. I know that I’m better at programming than creating art, so I wanted to focus on the technical side. Additionally, I’ve wanted to do a project with ray casting for a very long time. I decided that I could finally make use of ray casting to properly recreate the spooky atmosphere of Resident Evil that comes (at least partially) from the first-person perspective and the dramatic lighting. However, the shadows and tinted textures were an absolute pain to get functioning correctly. It is blatantly obvious to me now that p5js was never designed for this. I tried numerous strategies to get the concept to function, and even more to get it running at a decent speed. The final solution I came up with was first to use a buffer to draw to instead of directly drawing to the screen -- the buffer can be significantly smaller than the screen resolution, therefore making the program run much faster. The next strategy was to avoid using p5js functions wherever possible (counterintuitive to be sure). All the math functions are terribly slow; using the default JavaScript Math library boosted performance significantly. Combine this with random janky graphics glitches, and I spent a very long time getting my project working. For the art, I made use of the remix strategy detailed by A.M. in lecture. I took some assets representative of early, ray cast games and changed them until they were significantly different from the source material. I also added text for the title of the game and the sound credits, using a font I thought well represented the off-putting vibe of a horror game.