game design, character development, 2D-World building & design, Unity, C#
The 2D platformer has been a staple of the mid-to-late 2000's and for most individuals, it has been one of, if not the very first experience most people have into the wonderful world of gaming. 2D platformers have slowly fallen out of favour due to the ever-growing accessibility of powerful 3D-orientated game-engines like Unreal, Anvil, and Frostbyte, and with the decline of Flash as a web-medium, platformers are in an ever-deepening decline.
The brief was fairly straight-forward. Create a playable demo to pitch a concept for a full-production game. We were granted full autonomy to create the demo to whatever style and pacing we wanted on the condition that the objectives were met
The demo had to be playable for at least 3 minutes. It needed to be 2D and be in platformer genre of games and be created specifically with the pc player base in mind
The Twilight Fog is an ode' to those classic story-orientated 2D platformer games that populated the web during the early 2000's. The game outlines the atrocities of war and its effects on the local population, both mind and soul. The game follows a young scout, Ohzi, as he makes his way through a war-torn landscape attempting to secure a means to protect his village that is dead-center in a potential conflict zone. The game is puzzle and agility-orientated, pushing the player to circumnavigate different challenges to get to the next level, but also allows the player to get captivated in the story that unravels as the player goes along.
The history behind the towers doting the landscape has been lost to ages. All that is known about their most recent use, is that they served to provide a combat advantage to the warring factions, providing cover and obscuring line-of-sight to enemy combatants. Some even bare a sigil of one of the factions, indicating their territory. After the war the subsequent drop of The Fog, they only serve as obsticles to be overcome
These serve the most basic of mechanics to any platformer, a platform to jump from. As with almost all world items, from a lore perspective, levitate in place with mana, a magic force that can be shaped and manipulated to give objects any number of properties. Prior to the war, many of these platforms served a basic transportation role, for moving raw materials from one location to another. With the fog, the ambient mana that kept these powered, have all but drained, leaving some stationary, while others have completely fallen.
Naturally, in times of war, people will use any means to disrupt, slow-down, maim, or kill their enemies. A main-stay of which, is the use of traps across the battlefield. The Warring Factions each developed their own means and methods of trapping the enemy but the most common form was that of pifall traps, often filled with deadly spikes. Rooftop spikes limited high mobility units from taking routes that completely circumvented being pinned down by enemy fire. Although the war is over, the traps remain.
Pylons served as nexi for mana collection and large-scale usage. Before the war, they were used to grant individuals the power to use more mana than what they had internally within themselves, for the express purpose of doing menial tasks that no one individual could do. Of course, this had potential to be used as a weapon as well. It could amplify all offensive-based magic a hundred fold, so to combat it's use for war, the Fog incantation was reinforced with a self-sustaining line, drawing mana from all items incased in the haze. Some pylons shattered immediatly, fixing their position to one place, others still function but because of the fog, they can't be summoned to anywhere, and oscilate up and down endlessly as a result. The shifters performed a similar purpose to platforms, but required mana to be infused manually, and thus didn't break when the Fog descended, but they can't be controlled either. As a result, they oscilate left and right.
The environment is comprised of six individual 4K-Quality large-scale 2D layers,
seperated by varying depth in the z-axis. This gives the world a sense
of immense scale as Ohzi traverses the world and its challenges.
Each layer is
bathed in a shade of blue and has varying opacity levels in certain areas to simulate the
feeling of being washed over by a dense fog, giving players a false sense of calm but also
plays a large part in the backstory of the location, as well as the current premise of the
story as it unfolds.
