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Pitch deck:

This is the pitch deck I created this week to pitch my game to a company or to be made during semester 2:

Title / Hook:

This is the hook which I think would best describe my game, I want the player to immediately know that the game will be difficult, that its a platformer and that you need to be precise. I chose the name ‘Shattered Light’ because my game focuses on the distortion of a perfectly safe thing, in this case the light. I chose the image in the background because it looks like light coming from all different directions and being ‘shattered’ in that aspect.

Elevator pitch:

This is my elevator pitch which we came up with in Sarah’s lecture during week 4, it is intended to be short and brief but detailed enough to make your game stand out among others, for this reason I included an open ended question at the end to make the person who I am presenting the pitch to second guess the information I just told them and to want to know more about why what I said is true. When you pitch a game idea to any company there is always hundreds of people doing the same thing per day sometimes if its a triple A company expecially so being able to stand out is key. With regards to why the pitch is relivant to the game it links in fully with the main story at this point which is the cat exploring a world which it used to do so with its family but now alone and with more fears then before.

Design intentions:

For the design of my game I want to denter it around a few existing design ideas for certain aspects, I would like the cat to look cute and clueless rather then strong and intelligant as if its exploring the world for the first time and the map aspects from both Ori and the Will of the Wisp / Blind Forest as well as Rainworld in terms of now showing any markers and just being a simple map shown from the side of the world like a ‘slice’. I included my initial plans of making a linear exploration game where you avoid he light and make it to the end simply by overcoming puzzles and nothing more centered on the underlying trauma aspect of the game and why the cat is scared nore how it can overcome its fears eventually in the end. My final idea centers much more around overcoming the issue of being scared of the light and learning that its okay to go into it and that its not something you should be scared of, building on the idea of having gradual resistance to it based on NPC interactions as well as reaching checkpoints in your journey.

Pillars:

Fearing the light because its deadly (shown in the gif on the side of the pillar)

Game is intended to be difficult (shown in the gif on the side with a part of the prototype people most struggled with)

Game aesthetics (shown in the gif on the side by images of how I would like the game to look / feel when played)

Player will have to pick upgrades and continue with them (shown on the gif on the side by the player realised light resets them, so the next time they go past they avoid it)

For my pillars I wanted to have 4 instead of 3 because it better fits my game, I could merge 2 pillars into 1 but it would not work as well that way. My first pillar is around avoiding the light and why / how you do that in gameplay. My second pillar is focused more on the mechanics of the game and that the platformer aspect is going to be very difficult on the player as well. the third pillar links into how I want the game to feel and look during being played, when the world is made I want it to feel abandoned and dangerous, something I briefly touched on when presenting my pitch deck was that I want the cat and player to feel like the world is fighting against them so that it will get more and more difficult to keep going and some parts may feel unfair in some ways. The fourth pillar is centered around the idea which I decided on more recently which is theat the player needs to change stratergy to get through some areas and getting to checkpoints allows you to ‘level up’ in some way.

Core game loop:

This is a rough idea of how I want gameplay to feel when playing, you complete a challenge which can range from a dfficult section of parkour or moving a box so you can sneak under a ray of light, collect your reward which in this case is an orb you use to build your resistance orgain health and then you move onto the next challenge. I want the player to settle into the idea of completing challenges and upgrading being one of the main goals in the game aside from the story since to be able to progress to the end they need to overcome everything. One thing I highlighted when going over this slide was that I want there to be no actual checkpoints throughout the game as in areas you reset to if you die, I want it to be ‘one life, one chance’ as is represented by trauma sometimes if you make one wrong step you can find yourself straight back to where you started and I want that feeling to be reflected in this game too.

Prototype:

This was the slide I used to present my prototype, some people chose to make videos of gameplay and why things are the way they are but in my situation I feel like its very simple and all its supposed to show is the light reset mechanic, how platforming is supposed to feel and the general aesthetic of the game alongside it. I put a brief overview of the game on the side and the idea of traversing through a series of challenges being reinforced here also adding that I don’t want the game to be linear and that I want there to be areas which you revisit later after you have gained a different ability or increased resiatance to the light.

Why should you make my game?:

This slide was dedicated to what about my game makes it different from another game which already exists but also what similarities to other games does it have which have succeeded in their launch and become popular, I talked about Rainworld being a similar genre that you are exploring a world which everything is fighting against you as well as the map system being similar to something which I want to aim for in this game. Celeste is good in terms of difficulty and similarities in platforming like being able to traverse through the world the same way and I used Ori for the last part in terms of aesthetics as well as map and the feeling which you develop for Ori through playing the game, He is a cute little creature which the player feels attached to and therefor is more careful about gameplay. I kept the scope simple because I want the game to be interpreted by the people who develop it more so then my own ideas for some parts because the views of a group can decide which of the things I have provided would fit into the game best. If it was to be made by a big studio then I would suggest that they make the game a different way and be able to add more mechanics like NPC’s to talk to or features like crouching changing your hitbox which might not be feesable for a group of students depending on skills. I wanted to creeate a game concept which I think everyone would be able to build to some extent and I think I have succeeded in this aspect.

Crit:

For this weeks Crit, on Monday we presented our pitch decks to eachother and got feedback on all parts of our game design at the end of the project, this involved things like my pillars and gameloop, they had to choose between strongly disagree and strongly agree as to whether these were relivant to my game idea, this is my feedback that I got back:

One thing which I think in future could’ve been improved on my pitch is the referances to the other games in my presentation, I think what they meant by this is that the games I mentioned were either not closely linked enough to my project or were not talked about enough because I think these games are the closest to my game which I could find so maybe more evaluation was needed.

On all other aspects I got majourity positive feedback so there was no other changes which I would have made at that point.

Who would play the game?

Who is your player? (age, life, situation, platform):

Age: 12+, Life: Casual gamer and maybe someone who likes platformers, Situation: Someone who has enough time to dedicate to a cat game, Platform: PC only.

How do they play? (session length, style, context)

Session length: A normal session would proably last for around 30 minutes depending on when they die, Style: Intensive gameplay, Context: Alone or during a break at work

What motivates them? (achievements, immersion, escapism, etc.)

Motivation: Figuring out what happened to the cats parents, completing puzzles and challenges, environment needs to keep them immersed in the story by being visually pleasing.

What other games do they play and why?

Other games: Ori and the Will of the Wisp (because of the platforming and puzzle mechanics), Rainworld (because of the story and world building), Celeste (because of complexity and platforming) and Hollow Knight / SilkSong (because of difficult areas in platforming and upgrade mechanics)

Why would they choose your game? Why is your game different and how do they know?

My game is a mix of many well liked and known games plus a character which I feel like the players will be attached to, they will know its different because of how it will be presented initially.

What might stop them from playing?

Physical imparements may stop people from being able to play and also if people have a short temper they may quit early on due to no checkpoints on the game and only being able to reset your health / resitance by beating the next puzzle.

Ricky Haggett Talk:

Games he made: willmonts warehouse, flock

Wilmonts warehouse: A simple game about being in a warehouse and organising stock which arrives in phases, you also need to serve customers as well as take in all stock without getting unorganised or else you fail.

Flock: An open world game about flying around and collecting more birds, lots based on environmental art and scenery asside from story. You play as the main bird and it can be co-op if you wish for it to be, explore the whole world and find them all.

Ricky is also the founder of a game studio called MobyGames which is current specialising in small scale mobile games.

Talking with him after this lecture and getting some advice on how te games industry works has really halped me during my development and making my pitch deck this week to pt into erspective what sorts of things big companies are looking for people to make as well as what industries to avoid because of AI etc. Applying this back to my pitch deck I was able to make a better more solid elevator pitch condensed down further and some valuable feedback on my prototype which I then applied in adding the objective at the end and the cutscene at the beginning of the demo.

Game loops and game design documents:

Prototype – Bare bones version of the game conveing a concept rather then the polish the finished game would contain

Demo – Polished version of what the game is supposed to feel like and make the player experience.

Sarah came in to give us a lecture on Monday morning about game loops and how you can represent them in a diagram

Game loops: Example (tic tac toe)

Creating a solid idea

When making a game its sometimes hard to convey what you want for the game to others because they only know what you tell them, for this reason on Tuesdays lecture we made boards including all important information and ideas for our game thus far so when the game gets made people have a more solid interpretation of what you are trying to make, this includes the core loop, the pillars as well as images and referance of aesthetic and feeling as well as what the game is not. The genre of game I want to make is quite broad so you can’t just say its a ‘platformer’ because then games like Celeste and Inside could be put into the same genre (Celeste is a pixel precision platformer, Inside is based on narrative and puzzles). I would consider my game somwehere in between those 2 as I want there to be an element of story telling and character development but I also want there to be challenges and difficult sections to traverse through.

In regards to how I want to tell the story, its limited when you make a 2D game since theres only so much environmental story you can tell e.g., if there was a zombie game and in a scene of a 3D game you see a positive test on the floor, you could assume that area is infected. Likewise on a platformer if for example you were in a forest and you see red in the background you could assume there is a fire. Most of the story in my game I want to be told through comic strip cutscenes or through physically interacting with a character in the world but of course there will always be an aspect of how the environment imapcts the player experience. I think theres many parts of the story moving forwards if it got developed which could be told through the environment and the surroundings e.g., another animal in the game shying away from the light or getting damaged by it, or the ‘dangerously beautiful’ feeling.

Below is the boards we made in Miro during class:

I have stuck with the aesthetic feeling of Ori and a few other games like First Light and the final scene in Celeste, for character design I want the cat to appear as innocent and clueless so the player empathizes with them better as shown in the character section, I also want there to be other animals in the worls but not organic ones, made up ones, as an example of this I included the Chocobo and Moogles from the Final Fantasy franchize as well as some referances of robotic animals I found on Pinterest.

In terms of GUI’s which I will use in the game and the HUD in general I want to keep it minimal to not confuse the player so chose only to include a Health bar and a resiatance to the light meter as well as a map which the player can access because I want to eventually have reasons to revisit areas they have already progressed through because the game is based around a cats trauma and part of getting over it is going over things which you struggled with previously, but they become easier when you do them again. The referance for the map I included here was from Ori and the Will of the Wisp and I also want to take a slight inspiration from Rainworld in terms of how it could look, very simplistic and a side view. I want my game to be difficult on the player and for them to struggle because its not based on a topic which is easy.

Continuing my prototype:

For progress this week I implemented the scene in the begining in which you see why the cat is scared of the light, this is what it looks like:

I wanted to tell the story in the most simple way possible as most of the interpretation of the game is supposed to be up to the player, you could take it as a puzzle platformer where you have to avoid light and other obsticles to reach a goal, or if you choose to pay attention you can talk to people throughout the game and see why things are happening.

Crit:

At this point in development I had another crit when I showed further progress on my prototype as well as my core game loop and elevator pitch, the game felt much more complete for sure but some feedback I got was to change the story in the begining from being the parents dieing to finding your parents which would then give a goal to the player which I was struggling to come up with.

Venny came in in the morning to help us get an idea about what we want to do for our gamed and the concept of ‘game pillars’ as well as thr many types of loop which you can implement into your game (e.g., minute to minute, second to second and hour to hour)

This is my first draft for the 4 main pillars for the game:

Fear the light	Pixel-perfect platformer	Explore a forgotten world	Adapt to survive
Light is deadly as you traverse through the realm where you reside, choose wisely who to trust and ensure your safety.	Put your life on the line and navigate through difficult challenges, perfect precision is required to progress further.	Down in the depths full of mysteries and lies figure out what really happened here and why everything is the way it is.	Gain new skills and higher resistance through gaining health and being able to withstand the light as you combat your deepest fears.

This is my first draft for the ‘core loop’ of the game:

This would be the core game loop for my game, it involves completing a challenge and building up your strength to keep progressing since I intend for the game to get increasingly difficult. In terms of design I want my game to be on par with Ori and the will of the wisp (shown in previous research in terms of aesthetics) and Celeste because the idea currently of my game is working through trauma which is not supposed to be easy.

To better understand the difficulty and type of challenges the player COULD face during the platformer I played through the first segment of Ori as well as Celeste and took notes of puzzle ideas:

Making the first prototype:

I started off by refining my sprite sheet, this included making sure the cat character had animations for everything and at this stage that only includes run, jump, walk, death and an idle animation when the player stands still for a certain amount of time. This is my full sprite sheet after that was complete as well as videos of what it would look like in the

Idle sitting:

Idle standing:

Walking:

Running:

Jumping:

Once the anmations were complete I started implementing a movement system into the game and once that was complete this is my player sprite:

I then got started on making a tile map which would fit the theme which I intend for my prototype as well as for the game if it gets developed at some point, I wanted to stick with the ‘dark’ aesthetic I originally plnned for the game as well as keeping to pixel art since that is one fo the only forms of art I am capable of which I also am confident I can convey the feeling of the game through. My initial tileset was this which I made extra tiles for in case I got time to work on a more sophisticated version of the prototype in following weeks:

Although I am centering around avoiding the light and it being dangerous I also created torch tiles to help the feeling of being underground because initially I want the player to fall into a sewage system after the first cutscene.

At this point I am leaving the cutscene creation for later development since it is not essential for the initial prorotype so I moved onto putting together the level anc creating the threats which the player will encounter, at this stage I want to focus on conveying the aesthetics of my game and create a mock level of what I want the player to feel during playing, for this I made another mood board

After figuring out specifically what I wanted I started on making the level:

Using the tile set I showed previously I was able to make this scene shown above. At the time of making it, it just looks like it is night time and there is no threats on the screen which could impact the player in any way so I itterated on this design and made this:

Shown in this is also when I added the collision objects to the level in order to make the cat not fall through the floor when the level starts and allow it to interact in the normal way you would with a platformer so the player can now interact with the envirinment.

For the final level I wanted there to be the feeling of being underground rather then just light rays coming from a blank ceiling so I added a roof to the level and sourced some light pngs to add the danger of the level. While making the prototype scene I realised that cats also don’t like water so I added another level of complexity through this when making the hitboxes and boundaries of the level meaning my final design for the first level turned out like this:

Just for now I used the orange lava tiles arounf the edges to make a border which the player can’t cross through making the whole block collidable and added 2 rays of light coming from the top of the screen. The blue boxes mark where the collision between player and light/ water will be registered and I added an orb of loight at th end of the level as a placeholder of where you are supposed to reach at the end.

In thr gameplay of the level above, t=when the cat hits either the water or the light it plays a scared animation and resets the cat to its initial position and puts the level back into its starting phase, this would be important for future levels if the game gets developed because it would mean that moving parts will reset, ideally the animation would play and then the screen would fade to black and the scene would reset during the blackout.

Crit:

During the crit this week we showed our prototypes so far to the class and explained our game loops and pillars and how they are shown in the gameplay we have made. For mine since my prototype at this stage was complete beside a cut scene and a being able to pick up the orb at the end of the level got the following feedback:

Based on this feedback from these moving forward I want to include a cutscene to help convey the idea that you cant touch the light better, make the orb at the end of the levl into something else and make it interactable, this is as far as I want to take my prototype at this stage and will be working on it all throughout next week along side a elevator pitch.

The feedback on the pillars I created for the game were all agreed on to be suitable for what I have to show so far so there is no adjustment needed for them for now.

In class we did a brief exercise about 3 main points in a game: mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics, for this task my group was assigned Papers Please to focus on to figure out these aspects (shown below)

Papers please: I think the intention of this game is showing that you have no control over some situations because no matter what you do you are always helpless and cannot change the final outcome.

mechanics: dragging and dropping items, repetative loop of the worker you play as involves approving or denying entries.

dynamics: game loop is working at the border, you check peoples IDs and then let them in or not.

aesthetics: gloomy, dark, dull, depressing, the player should be feeling like the character stuck in a loop, the game is meant monotomous

Working on our own ideas:

This is my initial idea for how the cat would look in my prototype, I have chosen to keep the design very simplistic drawing attention to the ‘shadowy’ nature of the character and exaggerating the eyes to make them stand out: Shown below are a few frames from my initial sprite sheet

After sticking with this initial design for a while I realised that it was too detailed for a prototype so I instead simplified it and made the cat easier for me to animate at this stage:

Although the cat didnt really look like a shadow anymore this is still fitting with a design I like so it is good enough for a prototype. I made all the animations for walking and jumping as well as the idle and put them all into Godot. The tile set I made completely on my own because I wanted the game to have a specific vibe to it (dark and eerie but in the light be vibrant) which is diffucult to convey in the game type I am making at the moment but in the final game if it actually gets made I am sure this document provides enough details on aesthetics.

This is a rough moodboard which I tried to adhere to for the screen I made for the prototype: The screenshots below are taken from my gameplay in First light and Rainworld.

The reason I chose these 2 specific games ot feature in my moodboard is because I want to try to attempt to replicate the feeling I felt while playing through both games of eerie darkness and the feeling of the world being dangerous or mysterious. Based on this I changed my sprite again to fit with this type of style and simplify it down so I could animate it more easily in my prototype:

These are just some of the frames which I made for the cat sprite and upon itteration I decided that the cat would not be a shadow since it draws meaning away from the game and more towards logic, I made this descision based off feedback from multiple people:

• Raven: I like the aspects of the game you have developed thus far, I think if you make the cat just a black cat and link it to the idea of being unlucky rather then being a shadow which doesn’t exist in light then you can add a resistance to it gradually and expand on it more.
• Mum: The concept is good but I think you need to make it a little more complex rather then just a cat trying to avoid the light, maybe you could add choices or other animals you talk to who tell you little pieces about the story as you go.

Based on this set of feedback alone I chose to adapt my concept and base story in the following ways:

STORY: The cat looses its parents to a car crash, the last thing it sees is the cars headlights, therefor develops trauma around lights.

WORLD BUILDING: Keep to the same style as originally intended and rather then the world being empty include others who sometimes are in the light sometimes outside of it to talk to and gain different perspectives. I want to keep the idea of the world working against the cat to make it seem alive and fighting against the player.

MECHANICS: The player will be able to upgrade health and / or resistance to being in the light representing overcoming the trauma of their past.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: Rather then up unti the end of the game the cat not being able to touch the light make certain scenarios when you can go in it or choose to do so along side another NPC, the cat will no longer be a shadow but just a black cat. (Unlucky and link to the parents dieing because of this)

Class work (Crit)

On Friday we had our 2nd crit, this involved creating a document and putting onto it our ideas for how we wanted our game to feel like when played

On my document I included questions which I wanted my peers to help with circled and we went around the class getting feedback off eachother via stickynotes. Once this was done I filtered through them and took note of any useful feedback which could be applied to my game

1 main thing I noted was the answer to my question ‘What style of game do you think this would be best suited too’ in which majourity of responses agreed with my initial approach of a pixel platformer. This concept was already expanded on in Jordans lecture earlier that week thinking about how our game would look if it was different e.g., if it was a rhythm game or a idle clicker game or a visual novel

(screenshot of this work below)

We also discussed based off what we found what we think our prototype should look like, since I already knew I wanted a cat sprite I didn’t need to worry about what the character would be but in terms of what is the core loop of the game or key aspect in which you want to showcase which I chose to be a static screen decorated in the way I invisioned the game to be made with the cat sprite which can run and jump and a beam of light down the middle which when touched respawns the cat. This shows the aspect of the loght being deadly and how I would want to convey this, so rather then the cat ‘dying; I would instead like for it to play a scared animation and then reset the scene entirely as well as the aesthetics of the scene being shown very clearly because personally when I pick up a game I base whether I want to play that game very heavily on how it looks rather then mechanics or world building.

Personal research

Exploring different ways in which the game could be made in Jordans session reinforced for me that I wanted it to be a pixel platformer experience since it allows the light to be depicted best and most clearly, the cat can add to the charm of the game and the furthest I would be willing to stretch away from that concept would be if the game would instead be rendered similar to another game I looked into when desiging this which is Ori and the Will of the Wisp or Ori in the Blind Forest.

This game inspired me to expand my horizons when I think of a platformer because of how inviting the game looks and all of the experimentation with different colours and vibrant landscapes while still keeping the dark appearance and making the game feel mysterious. In particular these few screenshots I took while playing the game are my favourite because of how the environment glows and works with Ori:

This typ of aesthetic draws the player in through appearance alone and for my final game if it was to be made I would like for it to be something similar (not on par with because its a student game of course).

Ori also has a very good map system which helps the player navigate, I am not sure at this stage whether I want the game to be linear or have situations when you backtrack to get to different areas e.g., a pathway which was previously blocked. For this reason a map is essential that the player will know where they are going so if I choose to have one in my game I would take insiprations not only from Ori but also from Rainworld shown below:

In class we started off by creating a mood board of all of the different things which make us personally feel a specific way and then expanded from there to create a big group board filled with different emotions and ideas on what we would want to see in a game, we then each picked a noun, an adjective and a verb from the classes collective board and made ideas based on these 3, I chose 2 players, being unpredictable and aggressiveness/ voilence.

In class on friday we then did a nodenoggin for each of our presentations we made for our 3 ideas (shown below) and this was my feedback:

From this I chose to develop idea 3 further since it was also a personal idea which I have liked for a while.