Whispering woods

a storyfocused 2D platformer game

Project overview

  • Team size: 6

  • Game engine: Godot

  • Setting: Open interaction design project course

  • Role: Art, animation, level design, etc.

This game was created as part of an open interaction design course during my masters study in interaction design. I worked togheter with a couple of friends in a team of six persons. We chose to focus a lot on accesibility and did a lot of research on the subject. My responsisbility was to toghether with another person create all the graphics for the game.

The Concept

The game is centered around the character Totte, which comes from a desolate place called the void, not knowing who he is or where he came from he suddenly gets teleported and finds himself in an unknown world. Here he meets other creatures and critters much different from himself and in his search to find his way back home he explores many different places and persons, finding out more about himself in the process. It's a game about feeling like you don't belong anywhere and how you can find yourself trough the people you meet along the way.

a tree

Implementation

The game was developed in Godot which in hindsight perhaps wasn't the best choice. At least from the art perspective as it doesn't have as many tools for hanlding art assets and creating animations, groundshapes etc.

The team had an agile way of working with two week long sprints. We also divided the work into smaller teams, some working on dialouge and the report, some on the code and then two of us on the art and graphics of the game.

Style and concept skecthes

The first thing we did was to decide on the concept and tha art style we wanted to have. In the end we decided to go for a more cartoony style as it was easier for the both of us to merge our styles together that way.

It was honestly a bit challening working two people on the visual aspects of the game as we both had very differing styles and preferences. We did, howerver, pretty easliy find a middle ground. When considering style and concept we created some moodboards and discussed alot abous the best way to move forward. Below are some of my sketches created during this discussing stage.

The main character

Since I had the most experience both in drawing and creating games we decided that it would be me that would create the main character. I started the process by creaating a few concept sketches of different designs. We wanted the character to be pretty anonym from the beginning so that it later could gain more character and be equipped with different items and clothing it found or gained during the game.

The final design ended up being the one you can see to the right. When drawing the character it was important to separate all the different parts on different layers in order to prepare for the skeletal animation. The animation was done in Spine, a 2D skeletal animmation tool. It was my job to rig the character, add bones, meshes and weights, and my other teammates job to animate all the chracters.

The other characters

The other characters where created in a similar way. First some concept sketches were done before the final art for them was created. These where also rigged and animated before being added to the game

The environment

Creating assets for the environment and putting it all together was also a big part of my job. All the art was created in procreate on my iPad. I created several different trees bushes and plants in different varietes depending on how far back in the background they were supposed to be. For example the trees in the back would have lower contrast and be blurrier than the trees in the front. This, together with a parallax effect helped create a sense of perspective and depth in the game adding to the immersiveness.

Did we reach the goal

The game was tested by people with different levels of gaming experience, two participants had a colour vision deficiency and two participants were less experienced playing games compared to the other participants. All participants agreed that accessible and adjustable settings in games are important, even if not all of them required it themselves.

The game was successful in some aspects and lacking in others. It was perceived as visually appealing, participants appreciated the option to use either WASD or the arrow keys for movement and the adjustments of the movement of the character. However, many features were not implemented at all or fully due to the project's time constraints. Functional filters for color blindness or higher contrast as well as the option to change font size or disable text animations were not fully functional or implemented.

Learnings

The biggest learnig I got from creating this game was how to work together with someone else on the graphical aspects of a game. During all my previous projcet I've either done the game myself or at least had the sole resopnsibility for the visual aspects of the game. During this projcet I instead had to work closely together with another i order to make sure the artstyle and feel of the game didn't differ too much and to consider another persons preferences and will.

I also learned to think more about accesibility when designing games and how you can make them more accesible to a wider range of people. Accesibility is very important as a lot of the population actually have to deal with accesibility issues either permanently or temporarily.