What Remains of Me

You play as Atlas, a robot reactivated in an abandoned, high-tech AI laboratory at the bottom of the ocean. It is a puzzle platformer: you upgrade Atlas’s abilities to get through the facility, deal with the feral AI in your way, and piece together what happened to the world and why you were switched back on. In the build shown here, Atlas runs on an energy meter, and energy Atlas has drained can be transferred into terminals to power the platforms you need to cross.

Two documents we wrote together in the Game Systems Design group, “Interaction (Wire, virus and energy) systems” and the “NEW battery and virus design document” (spring 2023), set out the rules underneath that — both are below. The wire is both the way around and the weapon: thrown toward the cursor, it plugs into the nearest pluggable object; holding the throw slows time to aim it in the air; on the ground it reels in and out to follow Atlas, and in the air it can be firmed up or swung to a 45-degree limit. Plugged into an enemy, the player chooses between draining it — taking its energy — and overloading it — pushing Atlas’s own energy in — and an enemy driven past full charge is stunned. Energy is Atlas’s health, and virus is carried as a share of it: draining an infected enemy pulls its virus across — not at all from a clean enemy, and faster the more infected the enemy is — and Atlas shuts down at 0% energy or 100% virus. The spring 2023 document adds that charging from a clean source dilutes the virus, and that an enemy with no virus is docile until it is given some.

The capture shows the wire swing, draining a battery pack, and spending that energy to power a terminal. Overload and the virus meter are in the documents but not in the footage, and the build’s HUD is a plain battery. The indicator the documents describe was drawn as a ring of charge and infection states, and a browser charge test shows how charge and virus read on an enemy outlet.

The game was made by Games@Northeastern: Studio, and the class that built it was organised to simulate a game studio. The class was split into departments — Art, Assets & Sound; Audience, covering quality assurance, community management and user research; Design; Logistics & Studio Management; Narrative & Story Development; and Programming & Implementation — and then into discipline groups: six content-design teams, Community Management, Game Systems Design, NPC Systems Design, Project Management, Quality Assurance and User Research.

I was assigned to Logistics & Studio Management as my department and to Game Systems Design as my discipline group, where the wire and energy/virus rules were written as a group; the game as built is the whole studio’s. What the project gave me was the experience of design and production working as separate groups with handoffs between them, inside a structure that ran its own playtesting — the studio’s itch.io page still carries its user-research survey.