The Tragedy of Pondiberry Lodge

The Tragedy of Pondiberry Lodge is a 3D exploration detective game developed in Unity as the final project for UTS Game Design. Players explore a mysterious house, uncovering clues and solving environmental puzzles across five themed levels to uncover its secret and escape.

Role

Team Leader & Lead Programmer (5-person team)

Contributions

Architected the complete game system: core gameplay loop, interaction framework, UI, and level progression
Designed and built the tutorial level and first main level / level template
Managed team coordination, task assignment, and code integration across all five levels
Implemented all game logic as the sole programmer on the team

Technical Challenges

Polymorphic interaction framework for designer extensibility. Every interactable (doors, drawers, keys) derived from a shared base with virtual hooks; player input dispatched polymorphically to whichever was in range. A new interactable was a subclass dropped into a scene, with no core code changes.
Build-order level progression. Each level’s completion tracked as a static flag and the active level resolved by scene build index; the next level gated on the previous one’s objective — a minimal, predictable unlock model across all five levels.
Context-sensitive prompts in trigger zones. A prompt manager surfaced the right action hint on trigger enter/exit for whichever interactable the player was facing, so the interaction target was always unambiguous.
Cross-scene state on stable IDs. The hardest bug was a stale Unity reference after an asset’s instance ID changed between scenes; inter-level state routed through a small manager keyed on stable string IDs instead of object references.

Lessons Learned

Leading a five-person team while also being the sole programmer taught me that clear, written conventions save more time than any tooling.
Would prototype the integration guide earlier next time and circulate it before people started building, instead of mid-project.

Playable demo: itch.io · Source: GitHub