Tunnel Lights

How to Play

Press F to interact. To board handcart look at a long side and interact, then interact again with the lever to start driving. Interact again when looking at the lever to stop driving. and at the side of the cart to exit.

I to open inventory, although functionality is not in.

The Elevator Pitch:

Journey through an infinite labyrinth of metro tunnels on your handcart home, picking through the toxic trash of a long rotten civilisation to survive to the next day.

Core Gameplay Concept:

A man vs. environment type survival game, try and survive for as long as possible. You’ll make your way through a generated labyrinth of metro tunnels on a manual handcart, occasionally stopping to loot side rooms and corridors. 

When looting, you must beware anomalies in the environment. While some are harmless, most will kill you. Keep your eyes peeled for also ancient traps. There’s no disarming either traps or anomalies, so go around.

Whatever you find while looting, you'll use to make suurvival necessities and make your handcar something resembling a home.

The handcar will start as a simple platform. Exppand it over time by gathering and spending items you find. There's a small variety of resources appearing in small quantities so choose wisely.

There are 4 status bars plus health: hunger, thirst, toxicity, sanity. If you spend too much time away from the cart, you’ll have hallucinations (which can kill you). Many areas are toxic, spend too much time there and you’ll die.

Prototype Plan:

- While the end goal is for the level to be generated procedurally, the prototype would instead be a small map I make by hand, this is to test the looting, upgrading, and survival mechanics.

- Probably only 3 bars (plus health): Hunger, sanity, toxicity, of course no hallucinations.

- I’d focus on making the upgrades and probably just have the cart move on the +Z.

- There’d be more loot areas in the prototype, just to cut down on the size of the map I’d need to make. There’d be just one anomaly, a blob to go around or over.

Prototype Retrospective:

Broadly speaking, we think it's representative of the core loop that was envisioned. While you can't eat or drink, the prototype is not long enough for that to really matter.

We wanted to make something that evoked lonely and slightly unnerving feelings and I think that we accomplished this really well. Looking back, it would have been better if we stuck with the original plan and hadn't bothered with making the handcart turn, it instead should have just been one long straight tunnel. The handcart turns based on waypoints and aligns itself with the rotation of the waypoint, and this implementation caused more trouble than it was worth in the end.

The 3 main things we want to do next (in order of importance) are: 1) Tightening things up technically speaking, there's more optimal ways to do things that would clear up a lot of spaghetti. Like transitioning the cart to use unity's spline package. 2) Adding narrative or some kind of motivation to why the player is here and what they're doing, as well as giving context to the setting

3) Art overhaul to make the world more explicitly sci-fi (as opposed to the vague soviet-scifi we have now) and tie into what I have envisioned for the setting better.

Comparable Games:

The Long Dark is a man vs. environment survival game with an emphasis on navigation. Tunnel Lights differs in its focus on resource management.

 

Among Trees is a relatively peaceful survival exploration game where you transform a run-down cabin into a real home. Tunnel Lights differs in its difficulty of survival and environmental hazards.

Metro is a series of FPS story games that follow protagonist Artyom. 2033 and Last Light were set in the tunnels of the Moscow Metro. Tunnel Lights differs in that it's a survival game and does not have combat against human enemies. 

The STALKER series is a series of FPS story games set in a fictional chernobyl exclusion zone. Tunnel Lights is similar in being insppired by the book Roadside Picnic, but differs from Stalker by taking place in an utterly destroyed world.