Korruption

My roles in this project:

Game Designer | Artist | UI Designer | Composer 

This game is the first one I made for real and until today is one of the projects I feel more proud about. The Game Jam in wich I made it (Ludum Dar #34) had a theme that was something like "the more you have, the worst it is". Me and my friend Magno (redashes.itch.io) came up with the idea of this game:

"You are a powerful wizard that was designed to bring balance to the Forc.. world, with that in mind, you should defeat the evil, but without letting corruption grow in you. Luckily, there are some crystals cleanser around"

It was a very pleasing and challenging experience, but also what made me fall in love for game design and UX. As Magno is as programmer, all the design and art roles was on me and it was a delightful experience to feel a little of these jobs.

First for the art, as I was alone with a crazy short deadline, I came with a simple an clean solution for main character, scenario and enemies. I am not a heck of an animator, so I had to save time and not be so ambitious. Since the main character is a mage, I though it was obvious that he had to have a hat and a staff, but I prefered not to chose for the robe to value the walk cicle animation I made. The final result was pretty satisfing for me.

For the UI, since we have different states of "corruption", I though it would be fun to have a HUD like the original DOOM, in wich the more damage you take, the angrier the character avatar gets. In my case, the measure was the more corrupted you get. 

I also took a reference from the PS2 Spider-Man 3 black suit UI dynamic. In this game, the more you use the black suit (wich is evil), the darker the screen was becoming from the borders, like it was consuming you. Though it would be a fun feature to make the corruption dynamic in our game more dramatic.

Following the UI dramaticity, the music of the game also follows the corruption metter, going from a soft and chilled guitar music when corruption is low, to a more powerfull kind of metal when corruption is high. I made this music in Apple's Garage Band App and felt realy good about the result.

The game design was divided between me and Magno, since we both were experienced gamers and not so experienced game makers. But it was very intuitive to set the machanics and constraints of the projects. The dificulty projection was pretty balanced and it was realy working for our intended result: a quick arcade game that has a short gameplay duration. We hadn't a lot of content in game, so it had to be short, simple and fun. And in my conception we nailed it (at least for the first try on game making).

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How to play:

-To walk, press and hold the right button
-To attack, press and hold the left button

-The red sign shows the closest Enemy (Follow the red sign to get to the closest enemy)
-The blue sign shows the closest Crystal (Follow the blue sign to get to the closest crystal)

-Watch out for your corruption Level, if they get to high you die.
-Corruption grows as you kill enemies, so be careful.
-Get crystals to lower your corruption level.

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Thank you for reading so far and I hope you enjoy. :D