Section 1 - 2D Game Case Study

For this task, we had to choose either a retro arcade game or a newly released retro-style 2D game to create 4 new objects for. I personally chose the game Forager which describes itself as "a 2D open world game inspired by exploration, farming and crafting games such as Stardew Valley, Terraria, & Zelda" on the Steam page.

Section 1.1 - Pocket Watch

My first object was an item for the player to get in exchange for completing a task given to you by an NPC. This item was a pocket watch with magical qualities, but these qualities had to be discovered via use. The watch had to be kept wound up, and if you let it unwind then time would start to slow down. On the flip side, if you wound the watch too much, time would start to move faster, giving the player a new mechanic to experiement with. While there are perks to time going faster, like your crafting going quickly, there is also dangers in the monsters that spawn nearby, as they would be harder to fight properly. The same goes for the other way around, time slowing down would make combat easier but background functions like crafting take longer.

Section 1.2 - Waystones

A frequent critism of this game is that while there are monsters and a health system, there is absolutely no punishment to dying. Not only do you not lose any of the items from your inventory but you respawn exactly where you stood less than a second after you die. My next object was a waystone, somewhere you would respawn after death as a method of punishing the player but not in a very severe way. I created 2 methods of getting these waystones, the first is that you could craft that and place them wherever you like and the other is that they would randomly generate on the various pieces of land as you unlocked them. For the crafted waystone, when you respawned, you could choose which one to go to, however for the naturally generated ones, you would simply respawn at the nearest waystone. In addition, the waystones would work with the next item I created, the teleportation medallions.

Section 1.3 - Teleportation Medallions

Originally, I came up with 2 different designs before landing on the medallions in particular. I knew I wanted an item that, when used, teleported the character back to a waystone of your choice but I was unsure of how to design or acquire this item at first. The initial design went hand-in-hand with the crafted waystone, as it would be a multi-use, crafted button that you could keep in your inventory and use at any time. However, like the crafted waystone, I wasn't particularly fond of this idea so I moved onto a one-time-use orb, as many other types of orbs appear in the game. This orb would be acquired like the other orbs through completing NPC tasks. Finally, my last idea was a medallion similar to the tools in the game. You would be able to craft these in the forge, and unlock upgrades using the pre-set tool ranks already in the game, which are slime (1 use), golden (2 uses), skull (4 uses), crystal (8 uses), demon (16 uses), void (32 uses), cosmic (64 uses), and finally nuclear (128 uses).

Section 1.4 - Magic Cape

For the last item to add to Forager, I decided on something that, at first glance, seems to just be an appearance item but has a special feature to it. Within Forager, not only are there randomly generated structures but you also tend to build quite a lot of structures yourself, taking up a large portion of the available land and getting in the way of moving between locations. This item is a cape that, once unlocked via an NPC quest, can be equipped like any other appearance item but would give you the ability to walk through any structures as if they weren't there. If this item was removed while inside of a structure, you would simply be pushed out of it to ensure the character won't get stuck anywhere.

Section 2 - Animating Game Assets

For this task, we went over how to storyboard for animations within our game, in a way that would have just enough steps to make sense to the 3D artist but wasn't unnecessarily detailed. We were given a basic character design to use and were told to design a fight animation for this character. After discussing theoretical attacks in a group, we split off to create the storyboards on our own. For mine, seen in figure 2.1.1, I made the character the protagonist and had them attack a nearby enemy. I did my best to depict the character doing a jumping roundhouse kick followed up by launching the enemy up into the air.

Section 3 - Level Design

This task was about creating a basic level for a rocket game our instructor created. The first level our instructor created had a small rocket start on a blue rectangle before dodging a moving obstacle to land on the finishing rectangle, colored green. For my design, I thought about what would be the escalation of this level, the next logical step to present the player with. I decided on two moving obstacles that were out of sync with each other so the player would be forced to hover temporaily in an enclosed space before they could move forward to the finish line. In addition, I included a lot of up and down movement to further get the player used to navigating up and down within this environment.