APD Week 3: Play and time - Shuttle cat

Context

The theme of this week is play and time. Many videos in class gave me inspiration, and the one that inspired me the most was the loop animation. This way cleverly makes a plot stronger. Time loop has always been used in film works and games, and it is also a topic I am very interested in, for example, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Happy Death Day. I searched for some videos about loops, some of which inspired me. A great work has been produced by an animator named Fabien Weibel, whose work Destiny explores this theme by a person's experience of falling into the loop of time and breaking the loop. This work conveys the meaning of time cycle, and the expression is very clear. The time loop can be broken, and the fate of the protagonist in the animation can also be changed. He just needs an opportunity to break the "time". So I am more determined to explore what kind of gameplay time loop can bring. In my previous game experience, the game concept of Temple Escape is a good direction. Players need to run on an endless road. I will define endless as a time loop and explore the gameplay in the loop.

Method

I used procreate to make a two-dimensional animation to express time, and made a loop animation to present a short plot of the game. I will try to demonstrate a new gameplay.

Response

The animation tells a cat walking in a pipe, facing an oncoming obstacle, jumping away flexibly, in endless time. I think this idea can be expanded into a small game. The player manipulates the cat to use different actions to avoid the obstacles that come. The game mechanism is similar to the temple escape. But the difference is that I replaced the definition of endless with a time loop. The cat in this exercise looks like it is running in place from the perspective of the player, but it has fallen into a time loop. What it needs to do is to avoid obstacles from other dimensions in the known unchanging time. Obstacles in the game have a variety of shapes and movements, and cats also have a variety of avoiding postures. The longer you stay in the loop, the more likely it is to break the time loop and enter the next time loop (the next level). 

Reflection

In this exercise, I looked for a lot of references to explore the meaning of time, and finally focused on the time loop mentioned by Matt in class. First of all, this is a very good and very popular theme, and many artists have also explored and expanded it.  But before I saw the animation "Destiny", I was very curious about why the time loop occurs and how to stop it. I am grateful that this animation intuitively explained to me the meaning of the time loop. In the practice, I focused on how to make it more fun to play. The thinking process is very comfortable. In this exercise, I explored the possibilities of the time loop setting for the game, and I learned a lot.

Reference 

https://youtu.be/wEKLEeY_WeQ “Destiny”, 2012, Fabien Weibel

https://youtu.be/2fgk1zGziws

Downloads:

Download File: 490e101a-b01c-4acb-a0be-9b33e41d1b06.gif