Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Occult

Art Bible

Occult is a game concept that i created during fall 2016. All assets, except sound effects and music, were created by me. From start to finish, the game was created in 9 weeks. The game takes roughly 5-10 minutes to play, has a boss fight, secret areas, collectibles, and a handful of easter eggs. 

The game concept was inspired by games like Hotline Miami. I wanted a game that allowed for fast-pased gameplay and more dynamic movement than most other games.

The Movement System

The movement system goes for a "Fun gameplay over realizim" approach. The player is able to climb and hang on to every surface in the game indefinitely, this allows the player a lot more freedom than in other conventional 2D platformers. The movement system also allows for a much more verticality to the levels, as the player can easily move in any direction.

One of the major challenges was to get the system working, as of now it works using box collision to to determine what action the player is preforming ( latching on to a ceiling, landing on a wall, or landing on the ground). If i were to revisit this project i would make the collision more complex, to make it easier to deal with diagonal surfaces (they are in the game, but are limited because of the complexities the bring up). 

My favorite feature of the movement system is the grappling hook, as it a very simple addition to the system i had in place, yet extremely fun.

Animation

The animation in this game is something that i am extremely proud of, not only for the end product, but for the execution also. I wanted to make my game in pixel art, as its a style i am fond of and comfortable with. This brought up a problem though, when it comes to animation, id like to say that im not terrible, however i find frame-by-frame animation extremely difficult, and more importantly, boring. 

So inorder to solve this problem, i created my characters by segmenting them into parts, then animated them limb by limb similar to bone animation. 

This resulted in extremely fluid animation, and a smoother(at least for me) workflow. I was also able to add detail that wouldn't be able to be created in frame by frame, such as the slides of guns moving back when fired, and reload animations with clips being removed and replaced.

Animation is an important factor in this game as it adds to the fluidity of the movement, never making the player feel like the momentum of the game has stalled.

Environment

The environmental art of Occult took up the majority of its development, and while i'm first and foremost a programmer and designer, i got to really exercise my artistic skills with this project. I tried my best to adhere to a color scheme and style. For the foreground i used unity tilemap feature, and for environmental assets i created prefabricated assets such as houses, churches, and trees, and placed these onto parallax layers, in all there are 5 different parallax layers.


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