About Art Design
This project uses a part of the materials we used to make (because it used to be our alternative, so we have already made a part of the materials). Because there is no narrative content, I set the artistic style of the game as the steam wave style with psychedelic color. Let’s imagine this is a character walking in a dream. It passes through genting, forests, abandoned cities and deserts.
About roles
The protagonist is a mechanical core that falls from a giant robot. In order to find its own home, it goes through various levels. Black looks very simple and easy to identify. I lowered the black concentration a little bit. So that it won’t be too eye-catching on the screen.
About checkpoints
- cloud top
The first part of the scene looks fantastic. I want to create a feeling that the protagonist is curious and mysterious about the world when he is just born. The background adopts many geometric figures and draws lessons from the color matching of steam wave style.
- forest
You can feel that the forest behind is shaking. Maybe you can feel the character in the wild and the wind is blowing it.
In order to fit the forest style, I made the appearance of the bar reader into a river. I feel it will smell like a forest.
- Abandoned city
I once made a city background full of neon lights. But then I think an abandoned city seems to be more in line with the atmosphere of this checkpoint. So I drew a silhouette of a gray city. There are only gray and red lights in the whole city. This makes people feel run-down and a little uneasy.
- desert
The elements I made for the desert include abandoned Buddha statues, falling spacecraft and abandoned future cars. And the hue of yellow is used as the main color. At this point, I refer to blade runner’s movie settings. Buddha statue has an extraordinary meaning in oriental culture. It represents the collection of all oriental cultures and the mystery. You will notice that this Buddha statue is broken. There are many circuits and wires in it. This is a sculpture art that I once made. I like this combination of religion and technology very much. It looks very visually striking and thought-provoking. It is one of my pleasures to put what I have done into my game.
In order to make the picture more vivid. All the backgrounds are animated regularly. I really like this feeling like breathing. It can make players feel less boring and cold when thinking about the level.
About the selection interface
Actually, we have two versions of the design.
The first version is like this:
Its shape comes from the head shape of the protagonist. I like the design of the art content in this game. The four parts are divided in an orderly way. It feels like a whole.
The second version is like this:
It can better reflect the style of each level. And help to better see the route of the checkpoint. Of course, to be honest, I prefer the first version. But everyone, my friend suggested that I use the second version to make players see more clearly. All right. We need to listen to the players’ suggestions.
Testing about demo
I’m glad that it took us about a month to complete a very complete demo. Yun completed the programming of this game mechanism. This has solved a great problem for me. I can’t figure out the logic to implement this mechanism. Thanks for his help. The reason for our rapid production is that most of the materials were finished in the past. Whether it is mechanism or art, we don’t need to spend too much time to finish it.
It is necessary for me to introduce the design of the checkpoint. This is the most important part when we test demo.
Our level design follows the difficulty gradient, although the complex level in the later stage is not very obvious (depending on the player’s situation).
For example, in the first level, our first task is not to make the player difficult, but to let him quickly understand the mechanism of the game. Because this mechanism is not a common form. We only did the simple operation of going right. Let players feel what the function of “bar reader” is.
At the second level, the direction will increase. Here, I’ll tell the player that there are props on the map of the game, and the player needs to go over and pick them up. And this level needs to calculate the order of “up” and “left”. This is to guide players to clarify the essence of this game.