Security Risk Removal

Security Risk Removal is a short interactive experience where you play as a national security officer, sent to protect your country from a hazardous chemical threat. Burn down their entire supply, and find out the truth about the threats to your nation.

Spoilers Below:

This project was inspired by the events of Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong, and the National Security law passed after the protests in 2019. Ever since those events, many books have been purged from shelves in libraries and book fairs, most of those relating to democracy, censorship, and political satire. I urge people to learn more about these events and remember the importance of stories and ideas.  Even though books and stories about these events have been removed, as long as we keep these stories in our heads and share them, no amount of book banning can kill them.

Learn more here:

https://hongkongfp.com/2023/05/26/not-recommended-reading-the-books-hong-kong-is...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causeway_Bay_Books_disappearances
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49317695

Project Post Mortem:

My project's intention was to go against the grain of the look of typical Unity games, by using a full-screen render pass to generate an old-school outlined game look. The decision to do this influenced how I created the models and assets for this game, making me prioritize having clear silhouettes and minimize details, since the render pass I created wouldn't pick up any details. Another way it changed things was since the graphics leaned towards such a low-fi simple look, I wanted the gameplay to be the same way, which is why the methods of interaction in my experience are as simple as it gets, mainly clicking the left mouse button. 

By far the biggest effect of this decision was how I dealt with the end of the game where the player takes off the mask and sees a whole new world. Because of the way the Unity engine handles render passes, I couldn't change the render pass material on runtime. In order for me to execute the mask removal sequence and change the look of the scene, I had to utilize some "hacky" methods and techniques to create that switch. The method that I used is typically for changing the quality level of the game through in-game UI, but I hacked that method to allow for that graphical switch. This made it so I couldn't actually use a properly animated cutscene, and instead just had to switch scenes instead. However, to still create a cool cinematic event, I added fade-ins and outs in the code to make the transition feel smooth.