Dust To Dust

Overview

Dust to Dust is a 3D Platforming game, where you play as a dust bunny journeying its way to a dust pan. However, as you move, the dust bunny shrinks, but you can collect balls of dust to grow. As you journey through the levels, they will change as the people around you grow and become older.

Being made of dust grants you some unique abilities and but also offers some peculiar threats. Shoot dust to launch yourself forward, avoid vacuums trying to pull you in, get launched by fans or sneak under their blades, and use vent covers to move across the wall or get pulled to somewhere else entirely.

Project Design Goal

Create a short game based on the prompt dust hero in Unreal Engine 5 using only free assets available under creative commons, in the span of one week.

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Detailed Information

Dust to Dust was made for a one week solo game project based on the prompt “Dust Hero”.

For Dust to Dust my goal was to take that prompt and build a game about how dust is floaty and how dust can easily separate. When designing a game around these, the unique physics felt like they lent themselves best to a platformer.

I looked for assets that were under creative commons, deciding that I would build the levels surrounding different environments that a person would journey through throughout their life. This allowed me to make the dust bunny have a hidden narrative of the dust following the life of a human that the player never sees.

I aimed to build the mechanic of the player moving be linked to an element of shrinking with the player shedding dust. I also had the player shed dust through a dash that they can perform. After playtesting the game, people identified that in some of the sections where players had to get smaller, having to do so manually was tedious. To improve upon this, I added the ability for the player to hold a button in order to shed dust rapidly, using Unreal Engine’s Niagara particle system to clearly show that effect.