The NYU Game Center Showcase 2024
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⟢Thesis
⟢Capstone
⟢Studio II
⟢Major Studio
⟢Mosaic
BYTE
⊹ ࣪.⋆~⊹₊⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆✩࿐
For Project Studio
BYTE is a tactics RPG that adapts the classic novel Dracula, by Bram Stoker, with an emphasis on the themes of queerness and technology.
You play as Jonathan Harker, Dracula’s real estate agent, completing work tasks while exploring the castle, speaking with its inhabitants, and hacking into computers.
Interview:
✧What was the inspiration of the game? What made your team decide to make this game specifically?
I love Gothic literature like Moby Dick and Frankenstein and especially love Dracula. I've always been inspired by adaptations of Dracula and have always wanted to do something with it myself. I have my best ideas when I'm exploring and adapting works that I find interesting, so I wanted to come up with a version of Dracula that only I could create and explore the themes that I am interested in.
I'm proudly from Portland, Oregon and wanted to set BYTE in Oregon to reflect that. Through BYTE I want to explore not just the PNW broadly, but pull from classic PNW stories like Twin Peaks and my own experiences with the area to create a new and unique take on the famous novel. As a queer person, I want to examine the interesting relationships between queerness, religion, and geography in the story and insert my own perspectives into it.
✧Were there difficult moments when developing the game? What led to those difficult moments? What did you learn from it?
Since BYTE is a solo project, pretty much the entire project has been a big learning experience for me. I want to use BYTE to learn how to do things that I haven't gotten the chance to do in other classes and that has led to a lot of moments where I have banged my head against a wall and had to work through complicated problems on my own.
Most of my big problems in development have been very technical, where I try to do things that I have never done before, especially on the graphics programming side of things. A great example of this was earlier this year when I decided that I wanted BYTE to look more complete visually so I wanted to force the game to run at a lower resolution but retain a hi-res UI for readability. This took me a couple of weeks of just reading documentation and playing around with render textures before I finally figured out how it all worked, but it led to a significant improvement for the game.
In general I want BYTE to as much of a playground for me to experiment as it is a game for people to play so I'm always learning as I develop it.
✧Were there darlings that you had to kill? What were they? Why was the decision made to remove them from the project, and what were the reasons that you like the darling so much?
BYTE hasn't had a lot of darlings to kill. Since I'm just one person, if I want something in the game, there's a pretty good chance it's going in the game. It also helps that I've been pretty hardcore when it comes to planning and scheduling this game. Semester by semester, I've been very meticulous about planning out what I'm doing that semester and making sure that my goals are clear and doable.
If there's one mechanic that I hope to one day get in BYTE that I've kept putting on hold for scope reasons, though, it's party activities. I really want the player's skills to develop by hanging out with your friends and building your bonds with them but it has always fallen out of the scope of what I've been able to do in school. One day I do hope to give Jonathan the ability to hang out with his pals, though.
✧Talk about your teammates! What was everyone’s role?
BYTE is just me! I love working all the aspects of a game so I take on all the work, from programming to writing to modelling and everything else. I love knowing how things work so working a large project like BYTE on my own is a great opportunity to not just understand how all the aspects of BYTE are working but to also learn more about how the tools I use, like Unity, work.
play this game on itch.io
Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2946750/BYTE/
@byte_horror