The Starscape Shimmer

Dec 2015

The Starscape Shimmer is an engaging blend of first person exploration, sci-fi, mystery and horror. In this immersive 30-minute experience, you will search an abandoned 1970s movie theatre for your best friend, a member of the science team that vanished while studying a strange phenomenon known as The Shimmer. As you explore the theatre, you will piece together the events leading up to the team’s disappearance through their scattered journal entries and notes. You will also find various films, each of which contain fragmented messages; decoding these messages will bring you closer to finding your friend, but as you unravel the strange mysteries that surround the movie theatre, you’ll end up discovering much more.

Below is a trailer that was made about half-way through development.

This game was developed by a team of five during the third term of the BCIT Video Game Development program. The game is an exploration game similar to games like Gone Home. As you explore the abandoned theatre, you begin to piece together what happened and why it has been abandoned. In addition, you can watch some old public domain films that we have included as part of the puzzles in the game. During development, I handled programming the player interactions such as reading notes, opening doors and manipulating objects. I also programmed the GUI and created some basic art assets for the game.

The Starscape Shimmer can be downloaded here. Code can be viewed on GitHub.

Developed With:

• Platform: PC
• Engine: Unreal Engine 4
• Programming Language: C++
• IDE: Visual Studio 2013