NEDEN
TEAM:
RANDOM PEOPLE AGAINST THE UNIVERSE
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Alessandro Violante
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Damiano Tagliaferri
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Edoardo Lanterna
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Emanuele Luigi Andolfi
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Francesco Giunta
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Lorenzo Masturzo
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Luca Quartucci
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Massimiliano Peruffo
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Riccardo Mancini
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Roberta Auteri
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Simone Bucarini
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Valentina Budeanu
ROLE AND CONTRIBUITION
GAME NAME:
Neden
GAME GENRE:
Top Down 3D
PLATFORM:
Pc
GAME ENGINE:
Unity
SCRIPTING LANGUAGES:
C#
DEVELOPMENT TIME:
10 Days
GAME INFO
ROLE:
I was the principal game designer together with Simone
My contribution to NEDEN
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I worked together with the other designer creating and supervising all the aspects of the game: story, level design, and gameplay mechanics
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I worked closely with programmers iterating the mechanics, gameplay, and abilities of the character.
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Design and prototyped the main abilities of the character
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Designed, and iterated the main enemies of the game along with programmers.
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Designed the main spawn of the enemies and how they would interface with the player during their state machine
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Supervised the sound, both during the fighting state and the normal soundtrack of the game that accompanies the gameplay
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Designed the weapons of the main character and how they would differentiate from each other in terms of gameplay
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Supervised the creation of the main character along with artists.
CONCEPT
The theme of the global game jam was DUALITY. So along with the members of the team, we started brainstorming a possible idea for the concept. One of our artists suggested the theme of the depression so quickly we decided to use that theme and quickly came up with the idea of the use of masks simulating the masks that people wear during the depression phase.
First sketches of the protagonist in his two phases
Prey
Hunter
The two different states of the protagonist
Prey
Hunter
GAMEPLAY
Once we decided the character and the environment where he will live his tale of redemption. I and the other designer started to brainstorm how the gameplay would be affected by the use of the masks. We decided to give the character two separate phases based on the mask that he will wear. In doing this we split the ability that the player can use differentiating and diversifying the gameplay through each run.
Prey:
The player in this state needs to escape the enemies until he finds the mask of the hunter.
In this phase, the player has slow movement and can only use a trap for slowing enemies down until he finds the mask of the hunter, while enemies keep searching the player and killing him.
Hunter:
When the player finds the mask of the hunter (the power will run out eventually) he will gain new abilities like a dash to follow enemies, and swords he can throw to kill enemies. In this state, enemies will try to escape in their spawn to simulate the enormous power that the player has in confronting them.
The player to finish the level needs to kill all the enemies before they crawl into their spawn where they can't be killed (disappear)
IF YOU ARE MORE INTERESTED HERE IS THE DOCUMENT OF THE CONCEPT PHASE (I KNOW IS ITALIAN BUT IS JUST FOR SHOW)
ENEMIES
After getting the basic mechanics, I and the other designer started to think about what enemies could be in the game. Given the nature of the protagonist, we choose to create the enemies divided into two states hunter and prey mode
Basically, every enemy can be killed once the player got the hunter mask but also the enemies can differentiate between their forms
The prey has a shield of a spike in front so the player needs to flank him from behind in to kill him while his Hunter version can be killed only by throwing swords at him
We decided that the JUMPER should be more of an annoying decoy while the player fights other more powerful enemies while giving him damage.
His main abilities are:
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Teleportation when is position his revealed
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Sniper rifle able to shoot the player from the distance
POST MORTEM
In the end, our team had so many ideas that we implemented 2-3 days only for writing them down and discussing them, thinking back we wasted time we didn't have, being too focused on having ideas instead of building them. We had to cut a lot of the designed enemies since we didn't have the time to program them and polish them. We didn't polish the gameplay since his development was late and delayed. If I can go back I will focus on a few ideas create them, polish them and if we have time expand upon them.
"Our fault was we had little time but played like we had all the time in the world until he run out"
IN THE END
This experience was great to get out of my comfort zone and genres, trying to create something unique and playable. This experience also helped me on how to communicate with other designers helping them and discussing the idea and their integration, also I had the responsibility of speaking with other departments, supervising them, and discussing with them ideas, especially programmers.