Welcome to Unsighted Agent

'Unsighted Agent' is a University capstone game created by 5 students Jacob, Jonty, Lucas, Nathan, and Seb. The game brings a new aspect to stealth/adventure games with a single-player co-op level-based game set in the year 2040 where you'll control two characters simultaneously using a traditional mouse and keyboard for you the player at home in a 'control room', and voice commands to control the ‘boots on the ground’ character called 'Derrick' your robotic secret agent. Progress through the level completing different contracts and upgrade 'Derrick' as you go along.

We are currently in week 3 of a 12-week production. Over the past 3 weeks and the previous term of Pre-production we have made numerous decisions that will define the outcome of our project. In our pre-production, we over-scoped massively aiming for 3 fully finished levels, so when we started this current term we came together and rescoped and realised we would rather have 1 polished level rather than 3 levels that weren't fully finished. So we put all our focus on the warehouse level in which you the player and your agent robot 'Derrick' would have to steal all of the Mafia's valuables that are kept inside by dodging guards, hacking keypads pads, and escaping without being seen. 

The main mechanic of the game is being able to voice control 'Derrick' so obviously, we want this to be an enjoyable experience for the players. We ran into some issues of the word detection not picking up certain words such as "Purple" or the detection not being able to understand words with people's accents or how they pronounce their words. So to counter we started to look at other word detection software other than Windows Speech which was our current software. Nathan our Lead Programmer researched 2 possible replacement products called Watson IBM and Azure cognitive services but sadly decided that the complexity of establishing these services is beyond the current scope of the project due to lack of information about the products. So we as a group just decided to work around Windows Speech and stay clear of words that it struggled to recognise, we also implemented a feedback system that will give the player a sound cue when a word is dected in being said but not recognised as a command for 'Derrick'. We also have plans to introduce a command manual that will be a popup list of commands that are contextually relative to players' current position.

A big decision we made early was re-creating our map,  the warehouse environment we had at the end of our Pre-Production class was originally used as our tutorial level which was based in a training facility and we turned that into a warehouse, which didn't make much contextual sense as the envirnoment was too large horizontally and didn't have the asthetic or layout feel of a warehouse. So we decided to create a new environment from scratch which set the team behind but was the right decision for the game. 

We are currently on track for our scope, having a Beta due in 2 weeks we aim to have the basic game loop and are happy with our character controls. But will still look to improve the game a lot more as the Beta due date marks the halfway point for the project and we still know we have a bunch more we can improve on. 

Unsighted Agent Team :)