With our game development finally coming to a close, I wanted to reflect on aspects such as what went well, the challenges we faced, and my role as game designer.
Goal and Ideas
From day one, our goal was to make a game that was straight and simple fun, providing the player an energetic and exciting experience that would get them excited about one of Shakespeare’s more obscure plays.
We wanted our game to be mechanically simple, so that people of all ages and gaming experience could jump right in and enjoy it. Taking inspiration from timeless platformer games like Crash, Mario and Rayman, we designed the protagonist as someone who could simply run, jump and slide or crawl to reach his goal.
At the same time we wanted to ensure there was a fair level of challenge so that the player would be working for their success and not getting bored. We envisioned several possible mechanics to achieve this: a chasing enemy, time limit, end-less runner style gameplay where the player is constantly moving forward, or a set number of collectibles the player had to collect. There had to be an incentive for the player to want to keep going and reach the end.
We finally settled on having the main focus of being a chasing enemy, as it both fit the narrative and was the most fun and exciting idea we had that held up after prototyping. We also wanted to incorporate a score, calculated on the number of collectibles the player picks up, and a timer based on how long the level took to complete. This would further add to the challenge and introduce an element of replayability, incentivizing multiple playthroughs to achieve the best score and time.
While our game mechanics are not hugely original, the way are presented are a mish-mash of genres and style. There is a clear cut story and goal (Antigonus’ escape from the bear to protect the princess), a twisted yet cute cartoon style, and almost arcade style of gameplay which is short, self-contained, and encouraging of replays.
Narrative wise, we didn’t want to tell the whole story. After a short intro told through narrated cutscene, the game would launch right into the gameplay, and then end on a tease for the rest of the story, as we see the princess find her own way in life. Antigonus is not a major character in the original play but we wanted to turn him into the main character here, something which was achieved by starting with a flash forward to him being chased by the bear, establishing his narrative importance, and then ending with him either dying to the bear or being successful in protecting the princess. We wanted to stick with Shakespeare’s story as much as possible, but chose to focus on this particular character and how his actions have and will affect the other characters and events in the play. Overall, our goal was to give an alternate perspective into the story of The Winter’s Tale, and even encourage players to also go and experience the original.
My Role
My main role in the group was Game Designer. I understood this as being the general director of the project, planning the basic concepts and mechanics of the game and helping tie the various game elements together into one cohesive project. We kept an active Facebook group chat where we posted our work, ideas and issues to get feedback on, as well as having regular meetings in person. As well as helping move ideas in the right direction, I always made sure there was something being worked on by everyone. I helped by making the bear model and animations for it, the environmental models, trailer and additional art.
I was also Sound Designer for the project. As I have a passion for music and sound design I wanted to ensure that everything in the game sounded and therefore felt authentic. A good piece of media like film or video game always has a good selection of appropriate, varied sounds and pieces of music to help create mood, enforce a style and draw associations to character. Our game is no different. Everything had sound, from the clicking of UI buttons, to the background music, to the sound of footsteps over differing surfaces. I wanted to ensure that the player felt truly immersed – like they were really in a wintery beach and forest setting. The music is tense, calm, or suspenseful wherever it needs to be. Parts of a performance of Vivaldi’s Winter are used as menu and gameplay music, as I felt they fit the cold intensity and introspective mood that we wanted the game to convey. The sound of footsteps over sand and then a grassy surface were used in their respective area to show a dynamic difference between the two areas. Winter winds howl in the background.
What Went Well
From day one our group worked well together, falling seamlessly into their roles and bringing a lot of ideas to the table. We built upon concept art by Janet, with her and myself making models based on her character and environmental designs. Amy was in charge of narrative, going through a couple of iterations that we went through as a team to find the structure we all liked the best. Karl was programming, and even despite a hard drive corruption managed to build a well oiled game that stayed true to our mechanical and artistic vision. It was great seeing our ideas come off the paper and into a playable state.
A comparison between 3 different versions of the game: Alpha, Beta, to Final
Our overall gameplay idea was simple so we really wanted to sell it, making sure the mechanics were polished, worked well and played off each other, and having good production values with our game assets, sound and artwork. I believe we have achieved that, with all of our group working together and independently bringing forward some really great work.
I’m really pleased with how our game turned out – it looks great and feels responsive. Even after playing through it countless times it is still fun, and the feeling of finally shaking off the bear at the end is incredibly cathartic. Hopefully people like it as much as we do!
Challenges
For the most part our development was relatively smooth – the ideas for our game came quickly. There were some features we wanted to add in that we couldn’t do to time constraints, such as voice acting, original music, another ending and a leader board systems. I believe these features would have added a lot more depth to our game, but were not core to the project and were therefore scrapped. Dynamic sound was also tested but was too challenging to implement – this would have been a wooshing sound of the bear and panting from Antigonus the closer the bear got.
This project spilled into the second term, meaning we had an additional 4 big projects to handle at the same time. Our group managed to pull through and finish everything we needed to for this project, but hopefully not at the expense of our other papers.