Hitchhiker

Description

Hitchhiker is a 3D mystery game by Mad About Pandas. As a hitchhiker with no memory or destination, players catch a series of rides, tracking the mysterious disappearance of a person close to them. They collect clues, engage in fantastical, philosophical and weird conversations and solve environmental puzzles.

For my internship, I joined the studio in 2018/2019 for 6 months as a game designer and programmer and helped with the development of Hitchhiker as well as other projects.

My Contribution

• Programming Besides many small programming tasks, I spent a lot of my time with creating a visual scripting tool for the usage in the project. The goal of this was to give the designers the freedom to change as many things as possible without the need of a programmer to adapt everything to the changes. For this, I researched and modified an existing asset, communicated with the designers about their needs and wishes for the tool and created all requested custom nodes.
• Documentation Since I was the owner of the visual scripting tool feature, I made sure to precisely document how to use it. I provided instructions on how to create new custom nodes and on how to use existing nodes and the tool in general.
• Puzzle Design I designed one of the game's environmental puzzles and did preparation work for many more. I also attended every puzzle meeting and provided a lot of feedback on the puzzles I was not directly responsible for.
• Story QA I regularly received story drafts as playable prototypes or scripts. My task was to play or read through them and find and report flaws such as loops in the branching narrative, plot holes or simply incomprehensible passages. Especially the first of five chapters, I accompanied from the early blockout phase to the final version.
• Additional tasks Such as helping out with other projects or representing the studio and the game on a convention.