Fossilogical
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Fossilogical is a sandbox puzzle game where the player takes on the role of a new intern at the run-down local museum, eventually bringing them to international fame. The gameplay consists of reconstructing skeletons by snapping bones together at their joints, and publishing them for display.
The game was a 3-person project with Ann-Marie Henderson and Erica Chen. I primarily worked on the programming, including implementing the game's:
- Joint-based attachment system
- Dynamic scoring
- Dialogue system
Scoring (Design Process)
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A very important aspect of the game that we wanted from the start was to not discourage players from being creative, while also giving them feedback. We eventually settled on an artistic-scientific scale, where players would gain information on how accurate their reconstructed skeletons were while receiving a positive score either way. A big hurdle programming-wise was then to figure out how to implement this system with data.
How a max artistic / low-accuracy score is shown in-game -
The final grading system works by estimating the accuracy of the reconstruction, and then mapping it to the artistic-scientific scale. We assigned each bone in the game with a type tag (spine, hip, limb, etc.), and then recorded all the "correct" bone connections in the inspector. For example, spine-spine connections were valid, spine-ear connections were not. When the player submits a skeleton to be graded, the scoring system first iterates through all the bones placed into the play area (ensuring that they are all connected).
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An example of a bone type and its valid connections Then, each bone is compared with their attached bones. Depending on whether or not their type connection is present in the dictionary, the player is either awarded or deducted accuracy points. At the end when the player is shown their score in the in-game journal, the accuracy score is displayed as a sticker-star spectrum; where low and high accuracy are displayed as stickers and stars respectively.
