The current demo of ADIEW was developed during the summer of 2022, taking inspiration from an old prototype I had put together in early 2020. This prototype was, at the time, my first experience with Unreal Engine, and therefore was massively flawed both design-wise and coding-wise. Regardless, I still appreciated the core mechanical concept I had come up for it, and therefore decided to remake it.

 

The original demo consisted of 5 levels, with very little art, animation, player feedback or general polish. The battery mechanic was already present in that prototype, but it was barely explored aside from being presented in a risk-free tutorial level. Level progression was also weirdly paced (jumping from painfully simple levels to a single overwhelmingly complex one).

 

With all of this in mind, for this remake, I:

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• Rewrote and optimized all the code of the original demo;

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• Added a save-file system to allow the player to complete the game in multiple sittings (since the demo can last more than 40 minutes for new players);

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• Added multiple instances of player feedback, like sound cues and visual post-process effects. An instance of this would be the screen becoming progressively darker, grainier and more muted the lower the player battery is;

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• Adding Start and Pause menus, as well as a congratulatory screen for the completion of all levels;

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• Re-designed 4 of the 5 original levels and got rid of the remaining one, as to make the learning difficulty ramp less punishing and more intuitive;

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• Added 2 new levels to fully explore the battery mechanic presented in what now is the 5th level;

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• Decorated each level properly, both with personal and free assets from Sketchfab (all credits in-game and on the itch page);

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• Improved preexisting visuals like the "environmental-scan" screen, the portals and the "slowing pads" with the addition of various particles, animated dynamic materials and post-process effects, as well as mesh replacement;

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• Added small narrative clues to tie the game together, both as text messages scattered across the various levels, as well as visuals cues;

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• Added animated models for both the player and the NPCs, for visual coherence (again, all credits for the meshes in-game and on the itch page);

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• Tweaked all the mechanics to be as player friendly as possible, including slowing down the player speed, diminishing the jumping-pad strength, delaying the portal-spawning as to match the model's animation, amongst others.