Wolf's Bane

a 2D platformer prototype

Project overview

  • Team size: 1

  • Game engine: Unity

  • Setting: High school thesis project

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

This game prototype was created during my final year in high school as a part of my high school thesis where I researched the process of creating a game. Since this was the first time I ever created a game I spent a great deal of time researching and learning new things, tools and even programming languages. Since I really like illustration the focus was mostly put on the visual aspects of the game and less on the actual gameplay.

the ducklings

The Goal

Since I had never created a game before the entire purpose of creating this prototype was to research and try to learn more about the process of game creation.

Implementation

I choose to implement the game in Unity as it allows for real time editing and is a well known game engine with lots of tools and resources. Since it is so widely used it also means that there exists a lot of turorials and resources for the enginge. Additionally, free to use non-commercialy.

Main character

For a long time I've always loved canines such as dogs and wolves. They are often occuring in my illustrations and one of my favourite things to draw so, inspired by games like Ookami and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, I chose to have the playable character be a white wolf. I of course begun by doing a few sketches:

After that I did the final design in procreate on my iPad:

Level design

For the level design and the gameplay I took a lot of inspiration from one of my at the time favourite games on the wii, Rayman origins. I tried sketching down a couple of levels to try to analyse how they designed their levels then tried to replicate the feel of the parts I liked the most.

Enemies

My plan was to inlcude some different enemies so I did a few concept sketches for them. However, I didn't have time to implement all of them so the only one I ended up implementing and animating was a black crow.

Animations

The animations were probably the part of the process that took the longest. I animated all the frames by hand in procreate. In total I did four for the wolf and one for the crow. This was also basically the first time I animated anything so I had to watch some tutorials for this as well.

Result

The resulting game only became a very short prototype as the scope of the game I chose was way too big for the time I had available to me. Despite it's many bugs and rough edges it did however look rather well polished for being a first time game.

I also didn't have time to create any menus or any UI elements which are often crucial parts of games.

Learnings

This whole project taught me a lot about how games are made. Prior to this I didn't know much at all and hadn't really though about it a lot. I hadn't really thought about the amount of time and work it takes to create a whole game and how many different parts there is to it. And, just like many other beginners, I fell into the trap of being overambitious in the beginning. I had this whole idea planned out but because the scope was too big I didn't get that far. Instead I should've chosen to do a smaller game that I would have had enough time to finish.

Nevertheless, I had a great time and I learned so much creating this game prototype. It really was my first step into the world of game development.