- Unity
- 7 designers, 4 artists
- 4 weeks + 1 week pre-production
- Scripter, gameplay designer, writer
What is Connect?
Connect is not a traditional game in any way, shape or form.
This is a single player cross-platform experience bridging computer and phone.
In Connect the player follows a maintenance worker during a night shift at the company owning and controlling all the personal information in the world, Connect. What seems to be a easy maintenance job turns out to be something very different, or… does it?
Play the game on the computer but use your real life phone to receive additional information, see things from a new perspective, and get the ability to Connect.
What did I do?
During the Connect project I was the madman behind the idea and somehow got the group to think it was a good idea to use two devices at the same time to play a single game.
I set up the phone-computer link and the system behind the communication between the two units.
Furthermore I was one of the two designers who created the phone application and designed its layout.
I also wrote parts of the story and designed some of the interactions with the world.
Phone auto-connection
The current year is 2018, so the phone has to have a smooth setup, no one has time for ip-addresses.
Thus I added auto connect, so that as long as the phone and the computer is on the same local network, the phone will connect to a game that is running.
To achieve this I start not only one, but two servers on the host pc, one is a standard Unity server, and the other is a broadcasting UDP-server. The phone is listening for the broadcast, receives the ip-address, then connect to the unity server using said address.
Voice acting
Adding voice lines to Connect was super important to make it believable. A text-to-speech would not have made the cut at all.
I have never worked with audio in this way before and it was a super cool experience, both recording, writing and also doing some acting myself! It was a great process and I hope to work with something like this again!
Connecting with the world
Connecting with the world in different ways was crucial for the game to feel more alive. Adding Easter-eggs and silly interactions somehow fit very well into the game and populated it with great effect.
Some of these are soda machines, tracking security cameras and pizza drones.
Fish ai
No boss office is complete without a grand aquarium.
No aquarium is complete without fishes.
No fish is complete without “fish ai”.