My role: Artist and puzzle designer Team size: 5. Development time: 48 hours. Play the game here: https://kamipenguin.itch.io/back-together Back Together was developed for Nordic Game Jam 2022. The game was developed based on the themes: sadness and trails. This blog post contains spoilers for the game, so consider playing it first. One unified themeThe art, writing, puzzles and interactive elements were all designed to support the narrative. If you pay attention to how the player can interact with the environment while inhabiting the main character, you can get a hint of who they are. The beautiful home is the property of the woman who lived there, and it is apparent that she took very good care of it. For example, the tells a story about how she carefully trimmed her roses. Meanwhile, the player will enter into her home and destroy every part of it they touch. The rose bush is entirely destroyed for their purposes. How to complete a game in 48 hoursIn order to finish the game on time, we decided to use the simple gameplay mechanics of a point-and-click puzzle game. We also chose to make all the art monochromatic in order to save time. This also let our visual style stand out and kept the visuals unified. It also had the added benefit of making interactive objects very clear by using color coding. In the image below, you can see the sketches we made for the puzzles and the order in which you unlock them. We first brainstormed and sketched out objects that might be in the home and how they might interact with each other. We then prioritized which interactions and puzzles we found most interesting, and we started creating the assets. As we worked on the game, we adjusted according to the time we had left, and we cut some puzzles which were lower on our priority list. We spent Friday on introductions and brainstorming our idea. We made sure to settle on an idea before going home. We voted between 2 ideas, where the other was a snail platformer, but the point-and-click game won 3:2.
We spent Saturday on puzzle design, asset creation, writing, and implementing the primary point-and-click interaction mechanic. We made sure to finish creating assets by Saturday night to leave time for implementation on Sunday. Sunday we put it all together. The final assets were implemented, gameplay was tested, and bugs were smoothed out. Finally, the game was not perfect, but it was playable and narrative was complete. If we had more time, the game might benefit from some adjustments to the game feel. Currently some objects are draggable while others are only clickable, which makes the interaction a bit unclear. More clickable objects and puzzles could extend gameplay, but the narrative fits well within a short experience like this. Comments are closed.
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Eva ChristensenGame designer, artist and game researcher. Specialized in inclusion and accessibility. ArchivesCategories |