Overview
Built as a college project over just a few weeks, Terminal is a 2D pixel top-down game created in Unity. The design and development took place over a 2-3 week period, specifically for a submission deadline, which is why the game feels incomplete. However, you can try it out and share your thoughts and feedback.
About Terminal
You play as employee 731B, trapped in the endless halls of NextGenesis, a metaphorical corporation representing conformity and loss of individuality. Surrounded by locked doors and corporate messages, you wander alone, questioning reality outside the company walls. Your goal in the game is to navigate the maze-like facility and reach the exit, trading the illusion of corporate safety for the freedom outside NextGenesis's walls.
Getting Started
Inspired by Apple TV+'s Severance, I began exploring works with similar existential themes and sterile aesthetics to guide the game's visual direction. This exploration took me through films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick), Interstellar (Christopher Nolan), Star Wars, and THX 1138(George Lucas), as well as devlogs from Lost Games Dev and the minimalist design of Hooked. I tried to study lighting, color, and composition from these references, then apply those lessons to shape the cold, isolating atmosphere of my game.
Before starting Terminal, I had little knowledge of game design or Unity, so I watched YouTube tutorials and indie devlogs to understand the workflow. Motivated to learn game design and development, I decided to make the game in Unity and learn the process, workflows along the way.
Designing the game
To bring Terminal's world to life, I began by designing the 2D tileset in Aseprite — floors, doors, walls, stairs, and more, kept consistent with a unified color palette. Extra care went into shadows and lighting to deepen realism and convey the sterile unease of the corporate setting.
Once the environment was ready, I turned to the harder part, the player sprite. I implemented a four‑directional walk system. Seeing the character move for the first time felt magical, it was the moment the game began to feel alive. For motion and timing, I referenced the Universal LPC Spritesheet Generator to guide the walk and idle cycles.
Building in Unity
With the player sprite and tileset ready, I moved into Unity to build the world, combining tile painting and environment setup into a single workflow for smoother progress. I painted tiles to define the space, set up player movement, and added 2D colliders to block walls and create a sense of structure. Ambient lighting was layered in to reinforce mood and depth, while voice‑overs and SFX designed in ElevenLabs helped shape the game's eerie tone. Most of the C# scripts for player movement, camera follow, and core systems came together with help from ChatGPT and YouTube tutorials. Finally, I added lighting shaders and a particle emitter to introduce subtle environmental cues that deepened the game's liminal feel.
Putting things together
With the environment, player movement, lighting, particle emitters, and shaders all built from scratch, along with an outdoor scene pack for the final garden, and voice‑over and SFX crafted in ElevenLabs, every element had to blend seamlessly, like instruments in an orchestra, to bring the game to life.
Conclusion
Terminal began as a personal experiment to learn game design, understand workflows, document progress, and explore how mechanics and creative decisions come together. Though incomplete, you can still try it out on itch.io. or watch a short gameplay of Terminal