FomAuPair | Gergely Szakacs

Fom-Au pair

Overview

This game was my entry for the HEJ - May (One Game a Month Hungary edition). https://itch.io/jam/hej-2024-majus
My chosen theme was Mother+You had one job with the extra challenge 20 seconds
The project is an isometric, score based challenge of an au pair character trying to manage a household.
A secondary game loop of 20 seconds was added to denote the periodic notification of the player character's phone, which should be checked accordingly.
For this game I've developed an object and floor hiding system thus the player can see the action uncovered in an indoor environment.

Project Details

Designed and developed in less than 1 month
Created in UE 5.3
Scripting, Feature Development, Game & Level Design
Solo work
Assets from Epic Marketplace and the web (see sources on the download page)

Camera, objects, occlusion

I'd wanted to develop an isometric view game eventually , and I decided to do that in this project. This view usually gives a nice wide and elevated sight of the level to the player. As the game formed, I realized the isometric view is a hindrance for an indoor game as the player needs to take care of a household. I added a fix camera rotation input available to the player, still the player character was not visible at all times.

So I got the idea from the Baldur's Gate 3 camera system, which enables players to see their character at all times by occluding meshes and hiding objects.

In my case I implemented two different functions to end up with the wanted result First I've added an opacity material to all the environment actors in the scene, and any actor caught between the camera and the character would occluded in a certain radius.

Second part was a complete hiding system of the house floors, where the player is not currently at. For this purpose room collections were created and enabled a quick switch of visibility on a floor basis.
Both functions would be depending of a box trace result from the camera towards the player character.

Reducing player visibility

The extra theme of 20 seconds was realized as a secondary timer loop, which ended up in a phone notification on the UI. If the player misses to "check" their phone, they would get negative points for the run. In order to simulate the severe attention need of FOMO, I'd add a simple camera zoom on the character, so the player is not able to see what is happening in the environment around.

I've liked this effect so much, I added it to the animations when the player is doing the chores as well.

AI features for the kids

Since the start of the project my intention was to have AI directed children to make the player's job more difficult. As the development time was limited I imagined only one scene with a house with the chores placed around in it. Still I felt that only one child would be easy to follow and clean up their mess instantly.

I've added a second child relatively early in the iteration process and it showed a more promising and organic hurdle to the player. The two children combined with the 20 seconds notification loop was a challenge already, but I wanted an increasing pace over time. Therefore I added the feature if the player has caught a child in the act of mischief, they would get grounded and stayed in their room for a longer time. This would help the player initially, but after each grounding period the child will 'evolve': they move faster, stay in their room for a shorter time and do trouble more frequently. As expected, the tests showed promising results: the player would require more focus and skill to keep up with the children after each grounding happens.

Post Mortem

I really enjoyed developing the game as I learnt much about material functions, AI systems and camera handling. I believe I've created a straightforward but challenging game loop consisting of the main countdown, the 20s phone countdown and the interaction with the objects and the kids. Testers had a struggle to get a final score above a certain level. Since the project was finished I feel many improvements could be made, mainly in the user experience areas:

different character animations for each point of interest
better UI in general
random location of the point of interests
a minigame to handle the phone notifications