The Button

This project was developed to bring my newly acquired knowledge about implementing savegames to use. Therefore, the initial idea for The Button was to create a (painfully) simple game where the user could barely do anything, and then equip it with a ridiculously, overly complex saving system. There were a couple of concepts at the beginning, but I quickly decided on the idea of a button (or rather a switch, but don't tell anyone), which could only ever be pressed or not pressed. This was the entirety of the game concept at the start: Give the user a button, and let them press it... as much or as little as they like. And whenever they are tired of clicking, they may just save their progress and come back to it at a later point. Eventually, I started thinking up a bunch of other systems, like stat trackers and achievements, however none of those made it into the final release.

My main inspirations for the saving system in The Button were "Cyberpunk2077", "Skyrim" and "Oxygen not included", all of which offer an unlimited amount of co-existing savegames and a savegame-browser of sorts to visualize them in-game. The first two also offer a distinction between Quicksaves and Manual Saves in addition to Autosaves, which are present in all three games. I tried to mirror this by implementing two distinct ways of saving the game, one triggered via the side menu, the other triggered by pressing the dedicated Quicksave key (F5).
Unfortunately, due to the extent of other semester projects, development on this one fell a little short. Yet, especially in the beginning, I took care to code cleanly, which was definitely helpful when I started adding more features on top in the end.

Click the download button at the top and give it a try!

My Contributions to this Project

Idea & Concept

Code Development in C#

Implementation in Unity3D

UI Design

Image Gallery

Main Menu, which switches color palette based on the last savegame

Close-up of the gameplay view

Close-up again, but with the button being pressed

Pause Menu, which allows you to save or look up achievement progress

Load Menu, which lists all your savegames sorted by latest

Close-up of the "saving notification" in the top right corner

This project was developed by Daniel Heilmann during winter term 2022/23 as part of the elective “GameDev: C# Tips and Tricks” at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences.