Hey guys, I’ve been curious about how to make a game like Night Trap. Being that you can buy amazing Cameras now days without spending a fortune, I think a game like this would be really neat to make.
Now, I mean obviously, a game like night trap will take a Video Camera and recording a lot of footage.
But the part that makes me curious is buttons.
if you’ve ever played Night Trap you can click on a button and interact with the video. Like make the enemy fall through the floor as it is a trap.
But also, if the people decided to change their alarm pass code in the video, it will prevent you from activating traps.
Normally I wouldn’t ask how a game is to be made, but this one really hits me in a spot of how to make programming interact with video.
If you’ve never heard of Night Trap here is a video -
Go to 2:43 to get to actual game.
The programming aspect is relatively trivial in most regards. The work and ‘cleverness’ behind it is mostly in the making of the video clips, getting the timing right, getting all the permutations and combinations right, maintaining continuity etc. On the programming side you are really just playing videos, checking whether the player did something at the right time, and then triggering the appropriate ‘outcome video’ if they did or did not, then updating scores etc.
The hardest part is making the 8 video feeds work together in a single story line.
I consider my self pretty decent at programming in Unity now, but this seems harder than even an RTS AI lol.
Different skills rather than harder or easier. The programming side would be a doddle, but if you aren’t into writing storylines, dialogue, making videos etc then of course it will seem hard.
This genre of games mostly came and went quite quickly as something of a gimmick ‘look what we can do with cdrom’ (and then again briefly with dvd), but plenty of the challenges seen in making the videos remain with other genres of game. For example adventure games where you need to keep track of choices made altering outcomes, coming up with complex dialogue trees. And has plenty in common with the old ‘choose your own adventure book’. Some brains are better suited to creating and navigating the webs created by non-linear story-telling than others I guess.
I’m not going to study the entire Night Trap game but it looks very much to me like it barely features some of the complexities I’ve discussed on the creative side of things. The story-telling isn’t even non-linear, it just keeps going, forcing repeated plays to stand a chance of catching all of the plot. Perhaps because it was originally filmed for a tape-based system.
