MEMENTO MORI

Memento Mori is a story-heavy 2.5D puzzle game where the player, or players, controls a pair of partners who must work together to explore the afterlife they have found themselves in. Created by myself, Rowan Knutsen, and Grace Pratt.

My Roles:

Game Designer, Unity developer, Character Designer

Prototyping

As I am the sole developer working on Memento Mori, it's up to me to test out mechanics and menus.

This video shows all of my first tests at lighting, main menu design and animations, character controllers, and the light and dark mechanic. The white dot can move on ground that is shadowed, while the black dot must move in the light. An early version of single player and local multiplayer gameplay can also be seen.

Shader Experiementation

Because the lighting for Memento Mori is so extreme, I thought it befitted a custom shader or two. However, I had never worked with shaders before.

This project was my first attempt at writing HLSL shader code for Unity.

I created a world shader which is cel-shaded such that areas that are lit are white and areas that are not lit are black. There is very little transition.

The character shader is not affected by lighting and is always white or black, with a Fresnel to bring back depth. It also allows for the characters to be seen through other meshes.

Black is meant to be largely invisible on a black background, and the same is true for white. The game's mechanics should largely disallow them from ever being viewed on a background that is the same color as they are.

Single-player and Local Multiplayer

Using the Unity Player Input System to make several control schemes for the same two player characters.

To allow for Memento Mori to be playable via local multiplayer as well as single player with character switching, I used the Player Input system. This allows a single player user to switch characters with a button press either on a keyboard or a gamepad, and even for local multiplayer to occur with both players using the same keyboard.