This is the second devlog of the Final Major Project, which would mainly discuss the first design, art and some scenes.
Design of Game Flow
The game starts in the forest and in this scene the player is instructed in basic manoeuvres such as walking and jumping. At the end of the forest is the ark.
The first time the player boards the ark, he meets Nuwa, who invites the player to join her in collecting the power of various elements to end floods and heavy rains.
The player can choose to sleep on the ark, and several nights of sleep will lead to the end of the game, which is God’s autonomous termination of the flood, but the living creatures are destroyed except Noah’s family.
Players accept Nuwa’s quest and will be guided to find the four elemental stones of wood, earth, metal and water in turn. (It should have been five elemental stones, still thinking about how to deal with the acquisition of fire elemental stones).
Players will be guided to the forest they have been to before. Due to the flood, the topography of the forest has changed and players find caves that go to the ground.
In the cave, the player needs to escape from the cave before the flood rises. At the end of the cave, players will find the earth elemental stone and the exit back to the forest.
Continuing to explore the forest will reveal wood elemental stones and materials that can be made into a rudder, which the player brings back to the ark to make it start to drive away. (The Bible records many interesting facts about the construction of the ark. According to Genesis, the ark had three levels, a window and a door. But the ark did not have a rudder, which some scholars interpret to mean that the ark did not need a rudder, that God was the captain of the ark, and that God did not need a rudder to guide the ship’s forward direction.)
Inside the cabin, players can find metal elemental stones and diving tools (which need further consideration), and the diving tools allow players to breathe freely underwater.
Once the diving tools are got, the player can dive underwater to find the water elemental stones.
The content related to fire elemental stones needs further design.
After collecting all the elemental stones, Nuwa will evaporate the rainwater with the power of fire, forming steam for the player to swim and levitate, and the player can enter the clouds through this channel.
On the cloud layer, the player eventually faces God directly and fixes the cloud, ending the flood early.
Art
The first idea I had was to make a pixel-style game. Because in terms of difficulty, this style is easier to make scenes and characters. Some of the characters were designed regarding the pixel art in MapleStory. Also made idle, walking animations for them.
However, in the process of drawing the scene, I began to negate this design. In this game, I wanted to render more of an apocalyptic-like despair, but for me personally, my ideas about pixel art are stuck at the level of cuteness and simplicity. With this in mind, I started to think again about whether I should continue to take the pixel style or change it. That’s when I thought of one game that used to inspire me, You Will (Not) Remain’. You Will (Not) Remain’, which could give players a brief, quiet and deep experience. Its hopeless and Lovecraftian atmosphere helps the player to connect better with the main character’s feeling of emptiness and its interaction with the enclosed world where it lives.
In this game, the black and white colour palette renders the game’s apocalyptic atmosphere. At the same time, the purple objects play the role of guidance and hints in the game on the one hand and enrich the colour of the picture in the composition on the other.
In deciding to go to black and white as the main colour of the game, I remembered the game called Limbo. The game is presented in black and white. Lighting, cinematic grain effects and minimal ambient sound are used to create an eerie atmosphere usually associated with the horror genre. Journalists praised the dark presentation, describing the work as comparable to film noir and German expressionism.
This art style gave me a shock at the time, so I finally decided to redesign the characters and scenes in this dark art style.
Forest
Details still need to be enhanced, including background, and light.
Cave
Details still need to be enhanced, including backgrounds, and particle effects (falling rocks).
Ark
The ark is inspired by the movie 2012. 2012 as a flood disaster film, in part, is a homage to the myth of Noah’s ark in Genesis. I think the design of Noah’s Ark in 2012 is a good restoration of the mythical ark and incorporates modern technology.
Coding
- A* Path Finding
In the game, Nuwa is assigned to follow the player. To achieve this, an automatic path-finding algorithm needs to be introduced.A* (A star) is a graph traversal and path search algorithm that is used in many areas of computer science due to its completeness, optimality and optimal efficiency. A major practical drawback is its spatial complexity since it stores all generated nodes in memory. Therefore, it is usually preferred to algorithms that can preprocess graphs for better performance in real travel route systems, as well as to memory-constrained methods; however, in many cases, A* is still the best solution.
By importing the Pathfinding framework, the A* pathfinding algorithm can be easily invoked in unity. In addition to the scripts that come with the framework, I can create my own scripts to better fit this project.
- Scene Transition
- Pause Menu