Week 3

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.