To-Duat - Unity

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Download for MacOS (Silicon)

Description

To-Duat! is a chaotic first-person simulator set in Ancient Egypt, developed as a team academic project.The player takes on the role of a sinner temporarily replacing Anubis in his funerary rites.Across five working days, the goal is to complete frantic and complex rituals: analyzing corpses, purifying diseased organs, applying ritual ointments, and most importantly, weighing the hearts of the dead to decide their fate.

The game combines time-based gameplay with chained tasks and daily variations: every mistake or delay directly affects the player’s own heart, which will be judged by Anubis at the end of the week. The toon art style and inspirations from titles like Overcooked, The Mortuary Assistant, and Papers, Please give the game a unique tone that mixes humor and tension.

Role & Contribution

In this project, I did not officially hold the position of Lead Programmer, but in the absence of strong technical direction, I often acted as one, making key decisions to push the work forward and resolve production bottlenecks.

Here are my main responsibilities:

 Audio & Sound System

• Managed the entire audio pipeline: sound effects, OST, and contextual sound feedback.

• Linked audio events to gameplay (dialogues, interactions, rituals, UI), ensuring immediate player feedback.

 Localization

• Designed and implemented a scalable multilingual localization system.

• Integrated localization across UI, dialogues, and interactions, enabling the team to easily update content.

• Opened the path for the game to reach broader markets.

Scene Management & Game Flow

• Developed an optimized scene loading and game flow management system.

• Implemented transitions, loading screens, and resource handling to maintain stable performance.

 Dialogue System

• Built an interactive dialogue system, fully connected to localization and UI.

• Designed it to manage states, inputs, conditions, and audiovisual feedback.

• Structured it to be extensible and reusable, supporting future narrative content.

Shader & Supporto Artistico

• Developed and integrated custom shaders (Toon Shader, Ghost Shader) to support the art team and enhance the game’s cartoon aesthetic.

• Worked closely with artists to adjust materials, lighting, and visual feedback, ensuring a coherent and functional pipeline.

• Provided technical assistance with Unity to streamline asset integration and resolve issues that could slow down production.

 Gameplay & Systems

• Contributed to core systems: character controller, interactions, pause, and save systems.

• Implemented supporting features like internal debugging and testing tools (editor utilities, quick save/load).

• Handled continuous bug fixing and optimization of existing systems.

 Team & Technical Support

• Managed complex merges between parallel branches, resolving conflicts and keeping the development build stable.

• Provided ongoing technical support to the team, becoming a reference point especially for artists and designers.

• Even without the official Lead Programmer role, I helped keep the project on track during phases of poor team communication.

 In summary, my role in To-Duat! was that of a versatile programmer and cross-disciplinary technical support, covering multiple areas (audio, core systems, localization, shaders) while also supporting the team both technically and organizationally.

Extra Work - Personal Initiative

After finishing the project, as a personal initiative I made a porting to mobile devices, specifically iOS (iPhone and iPad) and MacOS.I also integrated a virtual gamepad for the mobile versions, although the best experience still remains with a physical controller.