Games Development - Final Submission

on
23/04/2026 - 06/08/2026 (Week 1 - Week 16)
Carren Yeliandi / 0376990
Games Development / Bachelor of Design (Hons.) in Creative Media
Final Submission
TABLE OF CONTENTS






Lectures


Week 1 - Briefing
Dr Ronald showed us some games related to mental wellness for our introduction to the module.

Instructions

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After the Cradle

After the Cradle is a psychological narrative experience with simple tasks, exploring post-partum depression through storytelling and gameplay. The game features an immersive first person perspective with dialogues and narration for maximum immersion with clear objectives to lead the player all the way until the end of the game.

Game Design Document :

Prototyping Document :


Progression

We started by brainstorming ideas. We had ideas for teenage emotional changes, how one deals with grief and death. We discussed a bit with our lecturer and we ended up with the topic of Postpartum Depression that was inspired by one social media posts that I saw a while back.

At first we wanted it to be from the POV of the child. How he hallucinates his mother and how we slowly discovered clues of the truth. However we decided to switch up and go from the mother POV instead as we felt like it would convey the impact of Postpartum Depression better. 

We drafted a Game Design Document for submission and asked for our lecturer opinion on it a bit later on (Week 7 Feedback).

GDD Draft :

We then tried playing around with Playcanvas, just to get the hang of it. We started off trying to make a small room and a few 3D entities for the physics and rigid body before coding the movement and tasks.

Fig 1. Testing 3D Entities(20/4/26)

We then started to work on the code. At first we tried to just see how far can we go using AI which created this.

Fig 2. Testing Physics (4/5/26)

Fig 3. Broken Collider (4/5/26)

We couldn't figure out how the collider is not working properly and decided to consult mr.Ron. We discard all the codes we have and used the tutorial that mr.Ron gave us along with the code from the official PlayCanvas documentation. Which proves to fix the collider issue (this means that the original movement code from AI caused the collider to not work, yikes). We had also added a shift button which will increase the speed (power) of the walk.

We also started working on some of the assets. We begin drafting the characters as well just to get a feel on how they would look like and what kind of emotions would they express.

Continuing on from there we sketched out how we wanted the layout of the apartment to look like and begin searching and download the free asset that we can find online. Some that was found to be perfect can't be downloaded or is not in the right format which means we had to re-searched some of them up again. We also begin searching for audio assets such as sound effects and background musics.

Fig 5. Canva Asset Compilation (22/6/26)

After that, we started to work on the apartment first. We divided our work into 2. My teammate would work on the assets  placement while I work on the movement script. Even then we still help each other out here and there.

Fig 6. Adding Assets (12/7/26)

For the movement script itself, I wanted to look left and right, up and down, not just move left and right, back and front. Which means I have to move the camera itself through the script somehow. 

There was a moment where the ground was a bit sideways. 

Fig 7. Camera Tilt Error (13/7/26)

Which we figure out happened because of the player entity collider itself. We had to enlarge our doors because of this.

Fig 8. Fixing Camera Tilt Error (15/7/26)

I also added in a headBob. I managed to find a few insights from a few documentation and community but in the end had asked AI for help. Through a bit of trial and errors as well as some fixes, the headBob.js came to life and now our walk is not like we're sliding anymore.

After finalizing all assets, we moved on to the important part. Making the tasks and dialogues. These takes the longest and drove us insane. There were a lot of bugs and somehow errors despite us believing that the code make sense and is supposed to work but is not.

Fig 9. Finalizing Assets (27/7/26)

Fig 10. Finalizing Codes (27/7/26)

Once we finished everything, we started adding in background music, dialogues and the documentation for all the assets. prototype and GDD.

It started lagging so much with the amount of assets we used and thankfully we had reduced the number of scenes but it was still difficult to record without it lagging or taking so much time to load the dialogues. Although there were some errors that popped up that I suspect was because of the assets reorganization that we did.

Fig 11. Failed to Load Resources Error (27/7/26)


Game Asset

For the assets, we have 2 types. The 2D asset which is the sprites for the dialogue and the 3D asset which is for the enviroment design.

Fig 12. 2D Sprites Asset (27/7/26)

The 2D asset, the dialogue sprites consisted of a face base and a variety of expressions. The character design for Vivian was made specifically to look cheerful and gentle but as her state deteriorates, her facial expression will go from tired to looking unhinged. The hair is short to give her a more mature look but was also caused because of her pregnancy where she cut it short for conveniences..  

Fig 13. 3D Environment Design (27/7/26)

The 3D assets for the environment design was found using a plethora of 3D asset website but we specifically targeted the downloadable and free asset. We tried to keep the asset style as consistent as possible but with the limitation of us using whatever we can find, it's alright at best. There is also some empty spaces that can't be helped but we decided to leave behind because it doesn't impact the game by much. Overall, we kept Feng Shui in mind while designing the layout and we ended up with something like the image above (Fig 13).

Game Asset Manifest :


Final Submission

Presentation Demo Video


Final Game Link

Feedbacks

Week 1 :
The game has to have a good ending since the theme is about mental wellness so don't leave the players with despair at the end. You can also try couch co-op gameplays for games about connection. Try stitching all your ideas together because they're good ideas.
Week 2 : You should start compiling your ideas into the document and try a bit of PlayCanvas to understand how the engine works. This can also help with your Major Project module.
Week 7 : Check the rigid body and physics or use a different tutorial video for the first POV movement. the GDD is a good start, you'll add more detail later but it'll not change the existing direction.
    This project took us quite a while to understand especially when the Playcanvas tutorials were limited to basic coding only which also affected our understanding of coding for Major Project. There's so many assignments within these past few weeks that we could barely have time to work all of them especially this project but thankfully we managed to get most of it done.

    I personally enjoyed the asset part, searching for the assets, placing them down and coloring them. Playing with the lights, colliders and textures, it felt like playing the sims. The sprites themselves were pretty okay in terms of enjoyment, it's not necessarily a hard thing to do but I definitely prefer placing the 3D asset with my teammate. In terms of coding, I was struggling, I understand the logic but lack the brainpower and memory to remember how to start certain codes but I do understand the logic and I can explain what I want to in computer language translated to human language but I can't do the opposite that well and had to ask for help either from my own brother or other sources. In the end, there were a lot of things that I wish could be added but I had to lower the scope in the end to ensure that everything can be done on time. There were a lot of game dev content in my fyp these days and all of them basically said "lower your scope, the important thing is to actually get a fully functional game" so I did it like so. Overall, I'm quite proud of what has been completed and perhaps one day I can revisit this game and make a remastered version of it.

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