Yokai Rescue | 2019 (4 months)
Game Designer | Project manager | Programmer
Unity | Trello | SourceTree | 7 people
Theme
Action | Platformer | Synthwave
Pitch
Yokai Rescue is a 2D action-platformer set in a neon-japanese universe. The player embodies Seiki, a yokai kitsune who has to ascend through an immense futuristic tower to get revenge for all the other yokais fallen in the fight against the Selvos, a technological alien race.
The player can use unique capabilities to move quickly through the air and destroy any enemies getting in his way.
01.
Context
Yokai no Shoten was the first project I made on Unity, and also the first of my second year at Rubika Supinfogame. I consider it as my first Video game, at that time, I didn't know a lot about programming, management or game design on a video game. We had 4 months to create a universe, games mechanics and make a playable platformer.
02.
My work
On this project, I had several responsibilities. At the beginning, I focused on the game design of the game, creating the universe, thought about enemies, but mainly worked on the 3C’s. When the game design was advanced enough, I focused on managing the team, organising reunions, plannings using Trello … At the same time, I was beginning to learn programming, so I made a few simple scripts for the game. And finally, at the end of the project, I worked a bit on Level design, and playtested a lot to make some balancing on the levels.
A.
3C's Creation
The controller was the core of this game, so we wanted it to be as satisfying as possible. We did a lot of iteration and faced many challenges through the process.
The first challenge was the controller. At the beginning, we wanted the game to be playable with a controller. We chose to use two sticks: the left one to control the movement of the character, and the second one to aim with the grappling hook. But from the first prototype, we saw that it was too hard to aim correctly using the left thumb. That’s why we chose to put controls only on the mouse and keyboard.
But after some playtest, it turns out that those controls weren't exactly satisfying. We found the solution to go back on a controller, and use aim assist to reduce aiming difficulty. But between those two moments, we had made some changes on the moveset of the character, and when we wanted to adapt this moveset to a controller, it didn't fit.
This was our second challenge: we had a too varied moveset, and when we tried to assign each move to a button on the controller, the player had to make weird moves to use it. Some players would have hand pain after playing during a short time. After a lot of iterations, we find a way to combine some moves to make it more enjoyable.
Finally, we had to make some iteration on the camera. At the beginning, our camera was very zoomed, we thought it was the best, because we wanted the player to be focused on fighting. But it was too hard for the player to see where he needed to move. We understood that flying through the air was more satisfying than fighting, that’s why we chose to make the character smaller and play with a much larger camera. That way, we had a more aerial gameplay, that matched our intentions better .
B.
Managing
This was my second experience in management, so I already had the basics. I would plan meetings on a weekly basis and split every week in sprints using the agile management method. On my last projects, I didn’t use this method, and I wanted to give it a try. As a team, we chose to use Trello to list tasks and divide them between us.
So I started to use it, I would create task cards every week that we would divide during our weekly meetings. Since I was new to this method, there were a lot of things that I didn’t make on this Trello, such as a backlog column to see all the tasks that needs to be done to finish the game, columns of the tasks done in each sprint, a value for each card that define its estimated difficulty and duration… But it was still a good experience in learning how to use Trello.
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We quickly found that using Trello wasn’t really adapted to every team member, especially for the game artists, who found it hard to see their task on it. I ended up creating a list of assets on Excel, that was more appropriate to the game artist's working style.
C#.
Programming Basics
Since I didn’t know a lot about programming at that time, I tried to make simple scripts.
I’ve worked in the extra capacities that Seiki can buy in a shop. And also obstacles that can be placed on the level.
For example, I had to program a paralysing cloud that follows the character with a certain duration. Or simple spikes that deal damage to Seiki when he touches it.
It was a really good introduction to Unity c# programming, and I’ve familiarized myself with the interface of unity, the basics of the physics system and the operation of oriented object programming.
D.
Level Design and Playtests
On this part, I worked with another member of the team to establish the intentions we wanted to have on our level design: we wanted to have a lot of free spaces for the player to easily navigate through the rooms. We also wanted our player to have a feeling of permed ascension. That way, we chose how many obstacles we wanted for each room and started making some level design. I didn't make a lot of level design, but I would test a lot and give precise feedback on which element needed to be changed in every room for a better feeling. I wrote documents to explain these changes, so that they can be easily changed.
03.
Conclusion
Yokai No Shoten was an incredible project for me. I learned a lot of things, in a very pleasant setting because our team got along really well. And I'll never thank them enough for that. My favorite task on this project was working on the 3C’s. I discovered that creating a smooth controller was really something that I enjoyed to do.
At the end of this project, we decided that we would continue to work on the game in our free time. This project is still running, and we hope to make it bigger than what it originally was!
Other members of the team :
Antoine Grugeon | Game Designer & Programmer
Lisa Follet | Game Artist
Marianne Cetkovic | Game & Level Designer
Valentine Vuittenez | Game Artist
Théo Valet | Narrative & Game Designer
Fanny Dufour | Game Artist
Arthur Galland | Level designer
Timothé Huerre | Game Designer
Alizée Remazeille | Level Designer
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