Ideation and Iteration | Project Proposal

Game Idea 1

Starting Point

For starters I wanted a game concept that was easy to work on for me. Knowing my skills and my fears, I decided on a game that:

has little coding
has lots of art
doesn't have much animation
is not story-driven
makes use of still images
has very simple mechanics
is related to my choice of theme

After some brainstorming I came to the conclusion that a mobile game is the best suit for me. The resons to back up my decisions are the following:

Brief

Assets by Trent Kaniuga

Still shot of the gameplay:

"Every year during the night of St. Andrews, the barrier between this world and the other is shattered and mistical forces break loose."

A cozy mobile game where you have to prevent monsters and witches from stealing food and causing troubles in the household, by throwing garlic at them. If all food is stollen before the first morning song of the rooster, you lose the game.

Simple artwork-> top down view

The restricted top down view makes things easy to illustrate. There is no need for perspective, character design, facial expressions and animation.

Create mistery->use sound

In order to create a sens of mistery and make the player emotionally involved, my game relies on audio cues and soundtrack in order to create suspense. The restrictricted view supports this, as the player will want to know what is happening outside the small camera view and more know about the setting of the game.

Emotional involvment of the player

To get the player emotionally involved, I added the element of the crying baby. The baby is disturbed by the noises and the monsters' activity in the house. As it is ambiguous what happens outside the camera view, the player tends to asume the worst and become more vigilent, in order to protect the baby.

Fast Paced Game

A compilation of sounds that I put together to illustrate a gameplay session:

sounds togetherArtist Name

00:00 / 01:36

I alternated calming sounds of the night like the dove song(I plan to also add crickets and the cracks of a fireplace) with anxiety inducing sounds that show the monsters are approaching. The prolonged silence bits are intentional and are meant to create suspence and anticipation to keep the player engaged.

Based on quick reactions. The player has to tap on the hands of the monsters as soon as they enter the visual range, and later can use weapons and more coplex mechanics to deflect them.

As we get closer to morning, the game difficulty intensifies and the pace changes.

Keep the player coming back to the game

To keep the player coming back for more, I can gradually introduce new assets, weapons, new monsters and mechanics, new settings and increase the difficulty over time. As a developer, this would be extremely fun for me to design.

I can also make use of visual references of traditional food and lifestyle, interesting elements that may intrigue the player.

Starting to design assets:

You can see my excitement to start creating artwork. I quickly designed some draft assets that I could put together to show my ideas.

I put together a portfolio of reference images of traditional food, seasonal local fruits and other interesting objects I could use as props:

References:

Assets:

bread

quince

jam

apple

cheese

A rushnik or "stergar" is a decorated piece of fabric recurrent in traditional culture, and has both practical and ritualic uses.

Weapons:

A mace is a blunt medieval weapon used in close combat. It's a recurrent motif in Romanian fairytales and is the primary weapon of a "zmeu".

Reference for the witch's hand. I drew a version opened and one close, to allow me to do some basic grabbing animation.

Inventory

I the proceeded to create an iventory of assets that you can buy/collect/unlock after each game.

Timelapse:

I also designed a Level Map using traditional houses from different areas. I thought it was suitable for the game, as each level presents a different household with different customs. I also decided to use this for the diversification of local food and create visual reference of the geography and different customs.