Game Development

Concept Artist

To maximize our ten-week work period, our team wanted to get started on the project right away. For me this meant creating rapid concepts to pass along to my teammates for the first weeks of the project. 

My priorities during this time were creating a world that felt full and vibrant while also making good use of reusing assets. Our team was only three people, so being smart about where we put our energy was crucial to getting the game done on time. I ended up designing large ruins as our battle arenas. These structures made it easy to manipulate a few pillar and stone assets over and over to create new and interesting layouts for fights to occur in. 

Character Modeler and Animator

My biggest priority in this project was modeling, rigging, and animating all the characters in the game. By the end of the project we had one main character, three NPCs, three enemies, and three bosses. 

Animating on this project was a highly iterative process. We play tested every week, modifying animations and abilities to feel more responsive and rewarding. The main character and the final boss changed the most throughout the process and it was very satisfying to tweak their animations until they were just perfect. 

Game Designer

Our original plan for the combat was much more involved; we wanted to include new abilities to unlock and more variety in melee attacks.  We realized early on this was way out of scope and had to pivot.

I designed the combat system currently in game. Instead of focusing our energy on melee combos, I pitched a ranged-attack focused approach. The player wields a spear that can be thrown and magically recalled, dealing damage both after being thrown and when zipping back to the player. Players are encouraged to line enemies up in between themselves and the spear for big recall damage. Throwing the spear the moment its fully charged also grants the player devastating critical damage. 

To add more challenge to this simple combat mechanic we introduced environmental hazards. The monsters in our game leave behind a black goop when attacking and moving that slows the player and causes damage over time. To clear the goop from the terrain, players use a special AOE ability that calls on the power of the sun. This AOE also stuns monsters and leaves them open to increased damage. Since the AOE is centered on the spear, players can throw then cast it for more long range lethality. 

Players responded very well to our combat system in playtests. Even those who don't play games very often were able to pick up the game quickly! 

Character Designer and Animator

As the character artist, I designed the main character and six customers for the player to interact with. My goal with these designs was to create characters who's personalities could be understood from just looking at them. I also wanted them to be appealing to encourage the player to get to know them better! 

Each of the six customer characters has a walk, idle, and sit animation. In order to allow myself enough time for writing I completed all these animations over the course of three weeks. Accomplishing so much in a short amount of time taught me how to manage my time and workflow to be much more efficient. I'm very glad I had the opportunity to practice those skills in this project. 

 Writer

I was responsible for all the dialogue in the game. I began by creating a very simple plot diagram for each character, writing out their backstories and what events I wanted to have happen during the game to develop their arcs. I then mapped out the main focus of each conversation to ensure good pacing and even distribution of important information. Once all that prep work was done, I wrote the actual dialogue that would be put into the game. I tried to give each character a unique voice so reading so many stories wouldn't feel monotonous. 

As game mechanics changed, I had to lower the amount of conversations each character had. This forced me to trim a lot of unnecessary fluff from each character's story. Although I was sad to see some of it go, I realized how important self-editing was and continued to hone each character's story so every conversation felt important. This project challenged me to go outside my comfort zone as a writer but I am very proud of the end result. 

Game Designer

Creating a core loop that was easy enough not to distract from the narrative but fun enough to be enjoyable was a big part of making this project succeed. The initial idea was to tie food quality to increased affection with the NPCS. Players would unlock new dialogues whenever they hit a certain quantity of affection. Players could also increase affection by paying attention to the character's dialogue and selecting the correct conversational options. However, feedback was very mixed during playtesting. It was hard to read the character's stories while prioritizing not messing up the meal.  The players felt stressed, which wasn't our goal. We decided to simplify the mechanics to create a more laid-back aesthetic. 

Eventually we settled on a system where the player hears every character's story in the beginning and narrows down to just one character over time. After hearing every character's dialogues, the player is faced with a choice of cooking equipment to purchase. These upgrades correspond with the characters- buying the coffee maker will progress Luca the catboy's story since he loves coffee. Not only do these choices let the player pick which narrative path to follow, but they open up new cooking minigames as well. The player is gently eased into increasingly complicated recipes over time. The player goes through this process three times until they've selected just one NPC to hear the story of. This mechanic encourages players to replay the game and also keeps the cooking aspect fresh throughout the story. 

Character Artist

Since we had three weeks to complete this project, we decided to go with a simple but clean art style. The inky lines and bright colors against my partner's painted backgrounds make the game seem like a fantasy storybook brought to life! Over the course of this project I ended up creating three sets of animations for both Maxwell and Eli at each stage of the game, with unique designs reflecting how the characters grow and change. 

The art style is intentionally deceptive. The simple, cartoony shapes combined with the childish opening scene lead players to believe the game will be more lighthearted than it is. They get attached to these two silly young boys and their friendship. This attachment makes it all the more heartbreaking when the two main characters betray and fight each other down the line. Maxwell and Eli battle to the death in the final scene, but the style brings to mind the childish and simple beginnings of their story. 

Game Designer

This project was created over the course of three weeks, so it was important to create a gameplay loop that was within scope of the project. We decided to aim for a very short but very polished experience.  

There are two sword stances- slash and stab. While not attacking, the character blocks the stance they are currently in. However, missing an attack or being blocked will temporarily leave you open to all damage. These basic mechanics are repeated in all three fights with slight tweaks to keep the combat feeling fresh without adding too much work. For example, in the first fight the two young boys can jump very high, swinging quickly to add to the lighthearted nature of the fight. In the last fight, though, the two knights can charge, but can no longer leap into the sky to dodge attacks. This gives the final fight a much more tactical and decisive feeling. It took some playtesting to fine-tune the combat, but we're very happy with how it ended up.

Writer

The narrative of this game was perhaps its most important component. There are only three fights in the game, so each dialogue had to carry a lot of narrative in a short amount of time. Too much text risks players skipping through impatiently, but too little leads to a vague and confusing storyline. The dialogues went through several revisions as my partner and I playtested the game to find the perfect balance. 

The game's story began as a Twine project. This helped me organize the different branching paths in a way that was easy to follow and edit. While writing, I focused on each character's flaws to create unique feeling paths. If Maxwell dominates all three fights, he is too devout in his loyalty to the crown to realize the corruption that exists in it. If Eli wins all three fights he is too blinded by his ambitions to realize all the power in the world won't satisfy him. The paths in between are less extreme- both characters flaws are on display. The end result is a story that examines how different people can drift apart and come back together over time and how differing goals and ambitions can turn even the closest friends against each other.