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Flight to Oblivion
Overview:
3D Semi-Open World , with an emphasis on smooth combat with inspired Mechanics.
The player and their aviation crewmate crash land on a long forgotten floating island. Rich with Lovecraftian history and horrors, the player must fight, dodge, and explore to find their sister and escape the island.
Responsibilities:
- Systems design
- Programmer
- Level design
- Sound design
- UI designer
Contributions:
- The design of the game world
- The design of the game's combat, enemy attacks and items
- The design and programming of the game's tutorial
- The programming of the game in absence of programmers
- The design and programming of the games HUD and menus
- The sound design and implementation
Design Philosophy:
The primary design pillars for the game were to reward exploration, free reign on how the player wanted to progress and the risk reward of engaging with enemies and obtaining items to use later.
Design Process:
Early in the game's development we originally had plans to go for a horror aesthetic which would contract with the bright environments. Due to the absence of our character artist early on however, this idea was scrapped in favour of refining areas elsewhere best we could.
On top of this, throughout development there were issues regarding programmers that meant their work was cut short on the project. After a long time without any programming work being achieved, the team came together and I took up the mantle of programming in their place.
Due to these issues in development, the design of the game overall was under constant iteration and scope management. Early ideas such as a boss fight, more enemy types and more in game story needed to be scrapped.
In the remaining time, the game underwent constant playtesting to further refine the game down to having what was needed to get the design pillars and game loop across best we could. In the remaining product, the game has the simple structure planned from the beginning, a beginning tutorial, an open area for exploration and story, and a final battle where the player would use all of the items they collected.
Reflection:
Looking back on the project, one of the aspects of development I believed I handled well was the iteration of the game's design and mechanics. Due to the amount of playtesting the game went through, it allowed for us to go through multiple level and tutorial changes until the final version.
One of the lessons to take from this project going forward however is the importance of responsibility and agile workflows within teams. Due to issue with a lack of agile usage among the team, many issues arose with workflow, decision making and organisation, if agile workflow was used more effectively, these issues could have been identified far sooner, allowing for more time to address these issues and plan scope for the future.
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