Introduction

'Virtual Recovery' is a game I made with a good friend for 'Hack K-State 2023'. The premise of the game is that the player uses their computer's file manager as an inventory and to solve puzzles. This is done by adding and reading files in the file manager.

Since I was more experienced with Unity, I made the main system for the game (the file management system). Persevering through sleep deprivation, we managed to bring our idea to completion and pitch our project to numerous judges at the event.

Saving on the file system

My friend and I wanted to make something with a unique game mechanic that we had never done before, so after making a prototype of the idea to make sure it would work, we decided to make a game that uses your file system to give hints, directions, and uses the files in the folder that the player provides to solve puzzles.

For example, in the video demo at the top of this page the player is faced with a locked door that cannot be opened. After interacting with the computer terminal, a new file is made in their directory that tells them to make a new file called 'key.txt', and to put the keycode '4319' in this new file. After doing so, the door is now unlocked, and the player can enter as long as they have a 'key.txt' file with '4319' in it.

This game mechanic was an interesting challenge because it needed to be tested thoroughly (to ensure that files were being created responsibly and not overriding data), and reminded me of how important ethical development is (you literally can have access to the player's file system!). This project also taught me how to do file IO within Unity.

Unfortunately, this game was never published to 'Itch.io', and the only way to play it is by downloading the zip file from the github repo, and running it within Unity. Late in development we ran into a big issue when trying to build the project. In order to allow the user to enter a path on their computer that we could safely use, we used Unity's library 'EditorUtility' to allow the user to select files on their system with their operating system's GUI. However, this library can only be used within the editor (a project using this library will not compile when built).

In the future, getting the game on 'Itch.io' would involve removing our reliance on EditorUtility. However, due to time constraints and our commitment to maintaining a positive user experience (by providing a streamlined process that doesn't necessitate users to manually locate and paste their file paths), we opted to submit what we had completed for the competition.