Week 1 - Ideas, Ideas, Ideas

This week, a lot of my work was focused on system ideation, UI, art, and animation. Let's jump right into it.

System Ideation

In our group meetings, we sat together to collectively decide on the game's theme and core mechanics, which you can read more about here.

As someone who enjoys challenge in my game, most of my contributions to these meetings involved introducing concepts to our game that would generate higher level of risk/reward, as well as extra opportunities for dilemmas.

Two examples of this are the main mechanic, which we've named Embers of Life, and the Oil Flask mechanic.

Embers of Life is our main mechanic - a health bar that gradually decreases over time, doubling as a timer that slowly counts down over the course of a run.

After the group decided to introduce a timer to limit the player's time per run, I made the suggestion to link the timer to health, as I believe it would generate higher levels of tension as the run progresses, in addition to making more meaningful changes to how players would approach exploration.

For example, a player may be more willingly to openly explore earlier on in the run when they have the Embers to withstand hits, but as the risk of the unknown increases, the health bar also acting as a timer may splinter a player's decision to push forward - maybe they want to turn back and farm currency instead of braving forward and risking everything. Or they could choose to push forward, knowing that any stray hit may lead to the run being over, heightening gameplay tensions.

In order to lower the acceleration of the risks involved, the team decided that introducing a way to regain health would be vital. While I initially pushed back, believing that introducing one may devalue the risks involved with exploration, we eventually turned to other difficult games for inspiration on how to create a mechanic that could work in tandem with high-risk gameplay.

Fig 1. Decision Tree for player building charges an Oil Flask.

We eventually settled on the Oil Flask solution - where player would still have a tool to heal themselves with (and get some extra time!), but also have the ability to build charges by defeating enemies. By doing this, we can introduce another level of dilemma after Flasks are used - where players have to choose between between gaining an illusion of safety, or to brave the unknown without a useful tool in hand.

Visual Direction

In addition to ideation, a larger portion of my time this week was spent refining the visual direction of the game - through both UI and character design. As a group, we collectively decided on the dark fantasy approach for this game:

Fig 2. UI gray-block for Tower of Ash.

Fig 3. Font choices for Tower of Ash. Sizes TBD.

During our discussions for art, we decided that we would turn to 16-bit pixel art as our main medium, as none of us were qualified artists. However, we did have some experience with pixel art for previous game jams.

Evolution of character design & idle animation:

First two iterations were created by Matthew, and the last was drawn and polished by myself.

Basic Attack Animation:

First draft of 1st swing of basic attack.

Final basic attack sequence.

Reflection

There weren't a whole lot of issues with this week's work as we are on the starting week, however, we have began task delegation and here is my agenda for next week:

- Continue animating player attacks

- Begin map design process with Nathan

- Begin creating UI assets and Ability collectibles (if time allows)

That's it for this week!