APD - Week 10【War of the World of Word】

Advance Play Design Week 9

Theme: Play and Abstraction

A 2D platform action game prototype.

Context: 

This time, I tried to make a game with an abstract art style. An object has many properties, abstraction is to pick some of them and discard all the others. I picked name as the main property for my abstract art style for this game, and also picked shape and color for some objects because I thought it will looks better. I exchanged the looking of every objects in this game with their names in English words, and made some animation by shaping and moving the letters to simulate their orginal looking.

Method: 

Unity 2020.1.0b1

Response: 

I always focus on game play mechanics design everytime I am developing a game because I think the core of a game is its mechanics, but I found my games always look very poor due to I do not pay attension on aesthetic. So I wanted to try to developing a game with most of time spend on aesthetic. It was pretty fun to thinking about how to form objects with letters. I make the bullet with all letters in the same size at the beggining, so the bullet was a square. After I tested all the mechanics of the bullet and worked on other objects for quite long, I suddenly thought about 'why didn't I make the bullet in the shape of a bullet?', so I changed the shape of the bullet just by changed the length of the letters, and the result surprised me a lot, the bullet looks perfect this way. Similiar things happend when I made the rocks, it really makes me very excited although I think I should thought about it at the very beggining.

Reflection:

I have thought about other properties to pick but I finally chose the name due to my lack of drawing. It was a shame but it also forced me to think wider to find some solutions that I can handle with my very poor drawing skills. 

I didn't make a playable game this time because it is not the main goal, and I was running out of time and ideas to design a boss battle. It's hard to design the boss or items that fit the art style of words, I thought there must be some special game mechanics fits with this art style perfectly that makes the art style bind with this game strongly and can not be replaced, like the cube style to Minecraft. Unfortunatly I didn't find one this time, I will keep thinking about it and maybe I will fininshed this game after I found one.

Reference: 

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F1%2F1e%2FAbecedarium.png%2F1200px-Abecedarium.png&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FLatin_alphabet&tbnid=4EhBIprGaYdTKM&vet=12ahUKEwjk6cmBir_pAhW_kksFHbqIARQQMygwegQIARBl..i&docid=fRUxRLrqJjTRjM&w=1200&h=826&itg=1&hl=zh-CN&safe=images&ved=2ahUKEwjk6cmBir_pAhW_kksFHbqIARQQMygwegQIARBl

Download:

This game is only a prototype that shows the art style, not a playable game at all, so I didn't make a build version.

The folders are too big to upload so I upload them to my goodle drive.