A Familiar Tale

"Keep your courage as you explore a mushroom infested forest,

full of puzzles, and help your grandma in need"

"A Familiar Tale" is a third person adventure game based on the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, about a girl on a quest to find a cure for her grandmother.

She ventures into the forest looking for a healing herb meeting bears, and living mushrooms along the way.

Platform: PC
Engine: Metronome
Project Duration: 14 weeks, 50 %
Team size: 17
Genre: 3D platformer
Inspiration: Jak and Daxter

Gameplay

  • Enemies

    • I implented AI behaviour using a behaviour tree. The enemies were two kinds of mushrooms, a death cap and a chantarelle. They could follow waypoints placed by level designers and react on player contact. I also added steering behaviours, such as wander-, separation- and avoidance.

  • NPC Bear

    • A bear gates the player progress and requires berries to move. I added scripted behaviour that included animations, subtitles and movement via waypoints set by our level designers.

  • UI (Menus)

    • I implemented a message based menu system that also handles the creation and destruction of scene entities.

Mushrooms wandering about in the magical forest



Soft shadows on tree branches

Engine

  • Animations

    • I improved animation blending and added support for root motion. Refactored the code and made animation settings data driven to reduce recompile time.

  • PhysX height fields

    • I collaborated with Aron Jönsson in importing height fields from Unreal to our new PhysX system. Handling of scale, rotation and position was complicated due to the fact that our landscape mesh was divided into ~300 pieces to permit culling.

  • Scene handling

    • I added the possibility of having different scenes accessed concurrently. We could modify our menu scene and game scene at the same time, reducing loading time when changing scenes and facilitating threaded loading.

  • Contact hardening soft shadows

    • Toward the end of the project I added contact-hardening soft shadows to improve shadow quality.

Lessons learned:

  • Decisions made early in a project can have long lasting effects.
    Time spent planning can save a lot of headache in the end.