sandy_island is a game i'm making for a class called "New Frontiers in Game Development", taught by Professor Sujan Shrestha. the class focuses on learning photogrammetry technology -- using many photographs of a still object to produce a 3d model, including a texture made from the photographs.
currently, i have most of my photogrammetric models ready for integration, and my main scripts are done as well. however, i haven't yet assembled the scene, which should be fairly simple, but i intend to do it over the next couple days to have it ready for release on itch on Friday (2024-12-13).
the game is named after a "phantom island" that was believed to exist for over a century, was even showing up on Google satellite view in the early 2000's, but was eventually found not to exist.
sandy_island is a "dream emulator", a genre started by LSD: Dream Emulator in the late 90s and carried on by excellent works such as Yume Nikki and Disillusion. this genre is characterised by surreal settings, often vague gameplay plot, encouraging exploration and experiencing little details for their own sake. Often, the narrative is literally a dream, which you eventually wake up from (or periodically, in the case of Yume Nikki.)
sandy-island is intended to be a fairly short game, <1hr of gameplay. it will involve navigating my doll character (which you'll see in other games i've made) through a dark column and up a dark spiral, talking to other dolls and figures and exploring through basically random stuff from my life to give a sense of memory chunks existing in a dark dream space.
as this is my final project for a class on photogrammetry, the main special feature is models and textures made via photogrammetry, which i mostly made using Kiri Engine on my phone, with some use of Meshroom, requiring plenty doctoring in Blender.
however, i also coded a "look cam" that lets the player switch from fixed 3rd-person camera to a rotatable 1st-person view, seeing as the doll looks around. but unlike the usual use for 1st-person, rotating cameras, it does not redirect the doll's direction of motion. the doll is limited in its ability to multitask, struggling at looking around while moving.
as this is a solo project, i've made all the assets.
find the code, assets, and working documentation on my github!
and as soon as the game is done, i'll be adding it to my itch.io account.