It’s Dawning

It’s Dawning

a short atmospheric game about a hobbyist game developer who ran out of steam.

Team Size: 1 (Solo)

Time Spent: 2 Weeks

Engine: Unity

Additional Software:

Miro
Photoshop
Illustrator
Blender
Audacity

Itch.io

Ideation

Theme: Berlin

Idea: Capturing my personal experience of living in Berlin – staying up all night making games. Heavy focus on level design, composition and timing.

View of the city from player’s perspective.
Bird’s eye view of the main scene.
The inside of the apartment.
Apartment balcony viewed from outside. Since the player can’t see much of the building, detail is omitted.
Illusion of space – the Berlin skyline is a flat plane with a city cutout.

Level Design

Wanting to replicate the eclectic style of Berlin’s architecture, I mixed building assets from a WWII inspired asset pack and Voxel flats, which reminded me of socialist buildings. The remaining gaps are filled with ProBuilder primitives.

With the fact that the player has a very limited view of the cityscape, I focused on creating an illusion of it by being considerate about the placement of the assets. My favourite part is the Flat cut-out sprite that makes it very obvious where the game is taking place. Using downloaded assets, I decorated the scene with trees, cars and other objects.

Small Assets

Not having any ready-to-use option to download from the internet, I made two assets by my own. I found a good photo of the berlin City skyline and manually cut out the outlines of the buildings in Photoshop.

The Cigarette pack is a simple cuboid that I quickly painted a custom texture for. I thought: might as well put a goofy brand name on both sides.

Cutscene Animations

Using Unity’s built-in Animator, I created little cinematics that get activated by the code on specific triggers. As there is no dialogue in the game, they are the most prominent storytelling aspects. For that reason, I made sure to put a lot of time and care into them.

Scripting

With a little help of Youtube tutorials and my own experience with Visual Scripting, I made a “Win Condition”. After collecting cigarettes and a lighter, the player can watch the final cutscene on the balcony.