My game is about a woman in a blue dress named Watershed (pictured in the center), whose goal is to defeat a bunch of ninjas to get back the money for, ironically, her water bill. This is ironic because Watershed, former superhero that she ostensibly is, has the ability to shoot water like a water gun, which she uses to battle the ninjas. At the moment, the only area/level I have implemented is this city area (pictured), where Watershed can interact with a ball person named Clarc (pictured to the upper right), who only shouts at her in his strange voice, as well as the mysterious Man in Black who prevents her from leaving town.
The game’s McGuffin is the money necessary to pay off Watershed’s water bill, which she can pay to the Man in Black on the map screen. The Man in Black, theoretically, also sells Watershed items that she can use to make the levels easier, at the cost of making it take longer to ultimately pay off the water bill.
Watershed can acquire money by putting out fires and battling the individual ninjas, many of whom carry torches to represent their connection to fire, which Watershed can of course easily destroy with her water gun powers. I intended for this to be an example of instructive game design similar to that seen in Super Mario Bros., as the player would learn from a mostly harmless, stationary flame that the player character can easily put out fires, which would be followed through with a more threatening, moving enemy who also uses similarly designed fire to attack. The fire serves as an example of abstraction; abstracting the idea of being able to destroy obstacles and move forward by designing the obstacles around a common theme, in this case fire, which can be extinguished by water. The game’s art style is also pretty simple and unrealistic in general, but the characters’ and objects’ vibrant and oversized elements (such as Watershed’s transparent, watery blue hair) show basic things about them, such as Watershed’s association with water and the ninjas’ black clothing that emphasizes their sneakiness.
The forward loop of the game is the mechanic in which money can be used to buy helpful items, which can then be brought to other levels in order to get more money from them, and so forth. The more money Watershed has, the easier it is to get more, and more, until the player has collected enough to finish the game.
The backward loop in this game is that the player’s death, which can be triggered by running out of health, causes the player to lose all their items. This encourages not dying, as well as saving their money to an extent since it will all be able to be bought back later even after dying if the player has a lot of money saved up.
I focused mostly on art in the development of this game (which, by the way, is tentatively titled Water Warrior, as can be seen in the very much work-in-progress title screen). I design a lot of characters in my free time, which the character designs for this game are taken from. I would say that bringing these characters to life via their animations was in the end my main goal throughout most of the development – I’m not historically used to drawing characters that are in a constant state of animation like those seen in this game, just stationary drawings. I got a lot out of this class in terms of learning to make sprite sheets using software like Inkscape and Pencil 2D.
In making the fire sprites (seen two images above) I initially had concerns about how to animate it convincingly, but I realized that fire need not look the same even a frame of animation apart due to how it moves in real life, so I completely redrew the sprite for each frame of animation aside from the wooden boards being used as tinder for the fire, which made it look like a constantly burning mass.
I don’t focus on realism in my art style – as seen in the image above where Watershed is interacting with the man in black, human character’s proportions are not very realistic in this game. Although I wasn’t concerned with realism, I did have an interest in keeping the individual humans’ proportions similar (this also applies to the ninja sprites I designed above). Although my artwork would hardly pass for realistic humans, I believe that they stand for what they are and look like humans in the context of the game – they resemble each other and appear to be members of the same species despite having numerous individual traits, such as skin color, clothing, and hair (or lack thereof).
I believe that the player can see what elements are important in my game because at the moment at least, they’re the only things that move and/or are interactable. Watershed herself is pretty distinct from her environment, being a fairly vibrant shade of blue among a background that mostly consists of gray, red, and green.
In conclusion, Water Warrior aims to be a simple platformer, but one in which the player has a lot of options, hence the nonlinear design. I’d really like to finish this and add all the features I hoped to add over the course of the class – this creative stuff is really important to me and I’d hate to see this all go to waste. Thanks!
