The Moonlight Machine
Premise: A tale of two cities… one hoarding light above and the other shrouded in darkness. Our main character (Gwen), working with an informant (Locke), hopes to break into a power plant in the upper city and steal a generator. With this energy supply, the poor city can finally gain energy independence. However, this mission will not be easy. Along the way, our hero will need to stealthily avoid detection, using her energy transferring powers to solve puzzles and bypass the factory’s mechanical lines of defense.
Credit
- Cameron Doyle - Sound Design, Story, Programming, Level Design
- Chori Jun - 2D Art and Animation
- Rashel Li - UI/UX Design & Implementation, Environmental Art
- Jack Tian - Programming, Level Design
- Nellie Tonev - Production, Programming, Puzzle Design
Voice acting by Cameron Doyle and Maria Hawthorne.
This game was created for the Spring 2023 semester of 53-471: Game Design, Prototyping, and Production at Carnegie Mellon University.
Tutorial:
Goal: Avoid the enemy vision cones to evade detection. Steal energy from lights to power objects around the map and make your way to the generator room. Try to avoid being illuminated — this will make you easier to spot and catch!
Playable character can transfer energy to and from instances of the following objects (if they have energy bars associated with them)
- Light sources: Powering them off reduces enemy vision range.
- Moving platforms: Moves the platform from one end of its path to the other.
- Electric/dangerous platforms: Player loses the game if touching an electric platform while it is powered on. Players can add energy to turn them off.
- Puzzle Pieces (pipes with gears): These have 3 possible orientations and can be charged with up to 3 energy units. Adding energy to them rotates the corresponding pipe 90° clockwise. Taking energy from a puzzle gear rotates it 90° counterclockwise. In other words, click and hold the left button to rotate them to the left, and click and hold the right button to rotate to the right.
Controls:
Movement
Left/Right Arrow Keys: Horizontal movement
Spacebar (while on ground): Jump
Spacebar (while in air): Toggle gliding
Energy Transfer (click and hold on energy capsules)
Mouse Left Button Hold: Steal energy from an energized object
Mouse Right Button Hold: Transfer energy to a non-energized object
Hiding
Click `q` while near a hiding spot object
For more information and external asset credit, see README.
Comments
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the game has potential but its not really playble at the moment.
I can see this is a hobbie project and its imperssive what you acomplished but it seems that you really wanted to realese it and forgat to playtest and polish some raff areas.
first of all all the dailog in the game interfiers with the gamplay and obstracting the screen.
A lot of the time there is to much text to want to read all at once and you are putting it in sections that you cant posibly read and play at the same time.
Some stuff like moving and gluiding is self explentory and can be explained with button prompts, players dont like walls of tet after they took two steps.
my final complaint is that some times there are multiple puzzels in a single level and that there arent any checkpoints. last thing fading to black between levels is just really needed.
I hope youll take the criticism to heart and work to improve the expirience.
best of luck with this and fututre games if you message me I'll might give the game another try if you feel it improved since writing this comment.
Thanks for checking out the game and taking the time to write feedback!
I’m aware of all the issues you brought up, especially the walls of text and how they can interfere with gameplay. These problems haven't been ironed out because this game was created in just a couple of weeks as a class project, and the tutorials and dialogue were pretty last-minute additions. But I’m sorry about any negative experience you had and will definitely take your comments to heart and work to create better projects in the future.
At the moment, I don’t really intend to do anything more with this game, and I uploaded it here primarily to just have a portfolio site displaying a lot of the projects I’ve worked on. I’ll let you know if I change my mind in the future and decide to go back and make improvements to the game.
All good, I hope you’ll keep making games