Hellooo,
So yesterday we finished our course: Game Project 1 and with that, our game, A Lamentable Sighting of Distortion (LSD). There are still a good amount of things we have to do before we can send the game to the Swedish Game Awards. Until then we will be posting the game here so that people can play it, and comment and give feedback. I was originally going to post the game last night, but I ended up baking cookies and watching movies with some friends (The Prestige is awesome!). Anyway, I'm posting it today.
From here to there, a short game's development :P
We started our development of this game by using a prototype I made in game-maker, for a course before this one. The story was the same, but the way that the game is played was quite different. In the prototype you had "rooms", without a moving camera. Also, to get the story in the prototype you'd have to platform your way up trees and clouds to find brains (in the picture I'm standing where a brain used to be), which would represented your fragmented mind. This is an example of what a level would look like:
The first thing we did when we started with the group, hippocritical, was to scrap the gathering brains part of the game. Instead, the story would appear as you go through the levels independently from what you do.
A Designers Reflection
As I think back to when we chose to have a "following" camera, without "rooms" (like the prototype) I wonder if I made the right choice. Maybe having "rooms" would be more interesting because we could create specific puzzles for the player to figure out. That means we could explore more game-play aspects of the game, instead of focusing so heavily on the story. This on the other hands would split us apart, because then we are trying to make a story heavy game with strong game-play aspects as a plat-former. And considering the time we had (and for some of us, like me, lack of competence in game making) it would have been really hard to actually finish making the game. We wanted to have a beginning and an end, and of course a middle. And we do! It's nice knowing we accomplished what we set out to do.
Well well, I suppose it's all a learning experiance, and we did a lot of stuff that I think is really awesome and that I didnt think we would have had time to do, like our cutscenes and voice overs. The cut-scenes still need a bit of work, but they will be finished by time time we send the game to Swedish Game Awards (again, we will post all updated versions here).
Feedback
It would be great to get some feedback on how you felt the game was as a whole and if you enjoyed it. We were really trying to make the player feel something by playing this short pretty-looking story based side scroller. Also, we would ask the players to, before jumping to conclusions that something doesnt work, try it a few times and look around and carefully listen to the voice over.
As Stanley Kubrick said:
"No one is far from understanding the film (in our case game). People want confirmation of what they have seen."
So with that in mind, you can ask me about parts of the game that were unclear or maybe you just have some thoughts about it and would like to share, it's all very much appreciated. But first play through it (it doesnt take too long) and think about the parts that were confusing, maybe your own interpretation is much more interesting. Post, comment and give us your feedback.
From Hippocritical,
We sincerely hope you enjoy our game.
Thank you for playing :)
Ps. I will post a list of all the things we are going to fix by SGA (swedish game awards) which is in two months.
Yay