Soul Building

Here are some concepts I made for how the souls could look. After a conversation with Chris I wanted to play with a simpler aesthetic for the souls and keep the more detailed style for the power-ups. That way they will be set apart visually but can still be associated with being a positive pick-up rather than an obstacle.

I find myself being drawn towards the middle one because I could have the little particles be animated but the only thing that would need to change between each level is the colour of the soul; green for the forest level, blue for the ocean level, grey for the gaseous level, yellow for the power level and red for the final level.

Laying Down the Base

Soul Furnace GDD

Target Audience – 10-12 years. This means they will have better hand-eye coordination to handle the difficulty/intensity of the game and will also be mentally mature enough to appreciate the narrative.

Platform – Computer (up, left, right and spacebar keys) but could be adapted to tablet format if the four buttons are on the GUI.

High Concept – Soul Furnace is an arcade-style running game where the player plays an Earth spirit that moves between six lanes in a an infinite tunnel to collect souls and dodge obstacles, ultimately saving the Earth’s soul from corruption.

Summary Overview – The game is arcade in the sense that it is simple in player interaction and linear where the player’s ultimate goal is to reach the final level and defeat it. The player controls Voodude the Earth Spirit (or one of the other unlockable characters) as he harvests the souls from natural resources before humanity can consume them. The player is trying to collect as many as they can, gradually getting closer to the Earth’s core where they can unite the souls and start a new Earth of purity. The player will have to dodge around six-lane tunnels that are abstractions of human resource consumption as souls head towards the centre and obstacles are flying around in various patterns.

Key Features

-          Four simple and responsive controls (move clockwise, anti-clockwise, vertically and jump)

-          Slick animation and aesthetic

-          Intense obstacles sequences and boss battles

-          Unlockable characters

-          Level specific power-ups

Gameplay

-          First Minute: The player sees a menu screen with the option to start a new game or review the scores from past games played. Selecting the “new game” option prompts him to select a character to player. At this point in time only one is available but the silhouettes of other characters and the conditions required to unlock them are visible. After he selects the character known as “Voodude” the screen fades to black and text fades onscreen, reading; “Wake my child. Your time has come to fulfil your purpose. In your home a hungry shadow threatens to consume your very essence. You must save the souls of your flock before they are subject to a fiery fate…” The screen then fades to the first level where the player can see the character they selected running away from a furnace on one of six conveyor belts. Small green souls begin to fall down into the furnace, refuelling it and straw buzz saws and sparks begin to fly up and down the lanes. The player is able to shift between the lanes to collect the souls, simultaneously dodging the obstacles and the chaos of the first level begins…

-          Gameflow: (see diagram)

-          Victory Conditions: The player must collect enough souls so that the fuel bar for that level depletes entirely. This will defeat the level and allow progression to the next stage. There will be several levels which the player has to complete to get to the final stage which defeating completes the game overall. Quality of play is judged by how many retries the player had to make, how quickly each level was completed, and how few souls were lost to the furnace.

-          Aesthetics: The levels will be abstracted versions of human resource consumption set in a spiritual world which the player inhabits.

-          Sound: Each level could have a different soundtrack or each character could bring a soundtrack with them. Boss battles would have their own soundtrack.

-          Controls: Left moves the character to the next lane in a clockwise fashion, Right in an anti-clockwise fashion. Up moves the player to the lane directly across the tunnel to them. Spacebar makes the player jump in the air off the lane they are currently standing on (used as a dodge).

-          Level Design: Each level will have six lanes the player can run on. There will also be some kind of fuel gauge that indicates how much longer the level will take. This refuels slightly for every soul the player misses but otherwise gradually decreases over time. Each level will carry with it a theme for both narrative and gameplay purposes. The obstacles and power-ups will follow this theme. (More on level specifics as they are developed)

-          Bosses: Each level could finish with a boss stage that relates to the theme of the level. The way the player defeats them is by understanding the boss’s attack patterns and dodging appropriately then picking up a power-up that can strike the boss back, reducing its fuel gauge, which is essentially its health. Following the arcade ‘rule of threes’ this will need to be accomplished three times consecutively to defeat the boss entirely. (More on boss specifics as they are developed)

Plot – The player is an Earth Spirit that has been awoken by Mother Earth to harvest the souls of purity from different parts of the world and bring them to the heart of the Earth where they can be united and the world can be reborn. The player starts with their own forest, extracting souls from the plant-life there, then moves on to the oceans in an oil refinery, then a power station, then the skies in a polluting engine. Finally the player flees to the Earth’s core as the world disintegrates around them. Upon succeeding the souls are able to unite in the heart of the Earth and start over once the world has been purged from corruption.

Characters – The players play as Voodude the Earth Spirit but other forms of Earth spirits are available based on progress made by the player. These will essentially be skins opposed to having separate storylines/abilities. (More on characters as they are developed)

Haven't Forgotten About You

Chris and I were discussing implementing boss battles in Soul Furnace and how they would attack and such. Pretty much what we came up with is it would be a Crash Bandicoot style where the boss has attack patterns that need to be dodged until they expose a weak spot. The player will have to run over a power-up to attack them, reducing their health and moving the difficulty of the attacks up a tier.

Doing the Rounds

And here we have three potential levels for Voodude to get his game on. I'll try and implement them in Stencyl for the demo but they'll be in the pdf as well.

Deforestation

Oil Rig

Power Grid

Boomskis! The Power Grid level is one of my favourites at the moment. I quite like the paths carrying on past the screen's edges which gives far more of a tunnel aesthetic. I don't want to invest too much time into making the other level concepts as my hypothetical team may have better ideas.

Some People Collect Stamps

Voodude collects souls, and looks damn good as he does so. I got the final animations done for him so his character model is ready for presenting on Thursday. I also cranked out some soul icons that would appear as collectables throughout the level. Each one is tailored to the level is appears in;

The tree soul appears in the deforestation level. The oil soul appears in an oil rig level. The electric soul appears in a power grid level. The gaseous soul appears in an engine level. For each of these levels I hope to make a high quality image on photoshop that shows a potential aesthetic. In the completed game each one would have a brief text prologue that explains what is going on and the souls' relevance. They will also have appropriately styled obstacles.
Deforestation:
- stray buzz saws
- broken conveyor belts
- falling trees
Oil Rig:
- oil slicks
- burning oil
Power Grid:
- electrified platforms
- arcing electricity (spirals around to chase the player)
- grid electricity (forces player to move to key platforms)
- sparks
Engine:
- pistons
- steam valves
- overheating
- stray machine parts
- certain platforms being covered up mechanically
I want to make the final level highly narrative focussed. The four levels leading up to it have been about rescuing souls from resources we abuse and take for granted. The final level would be about Voodude fleeing to the heart of the world as the earth around him corrodes and disintegrates. There, he sews the souls into the earth's core and waits for humanity to exhaust itself. A text epilogue will declare that only by living in harmony with our planet can we hope to live at all. This final level would be far more abstract than the others and would have Voodude saving human souls to sew into the earth's heart.
If anyone was to complete the game entirely there would be an option for a hard-mode play-through which will use more difficult combinations of obstacles and longer level time. If players beat that mode it could unlock a secret level: Hell. Voodude would run through hell from hell-hounds and evil spirits, freeing tormented souls as he goes. This is of course a mere passing thought but it could carry a message that our endeavour to rescue ourselves will be difficult but not impossible and we can escape from our past mistakes and the world we've made.

All Work and No GIFs Makes Scott a Dull Boy

Considering the nature of my sprites and how Stencyl processes them I don't know of an efficient way to convert them into .gif format to show animated. Instead you get a bunch of sprite chains (a 'sprite chain' sounds delicious).

I've broken the work I need to do for the pitch on Thursday into a list of tasks that help convey the principle game elements as selling points. I want the character animations to be really tight. Most of them at the moment are at a stage where they are looking really nice with the exception of the teleport sprites which due to their rapid execution means they look a little flickery. So there is a bit of animating still to be done and I can mention in the pitch that improving these animations would be a skill I can provide, possibly as one of my strongest.
Another task is to get the controls down for the demo so they are highly responsive. I want to promote the game with fluid player-to-avatar interaction. The controls are simple enough that perfecting them wouldn't take too long allowing a team to develop the levels with a lot more precision. This idea of simplicity is how I want to market the game. It is easy to understand and simple to play, meaning that the few elements it does have we can focus on pushing to s state of perfection rather than spreading ourselves too thinly over too many mechanics/features yarn yarn yarn. I would much rather have a simple and complete game of decent length than a rushed and overcomplicated and ultimately incomplete game.
I'll also try and create some really nice still images of conceptual levels within the game. These won't be animated but would act as building blocks on which we could build some really nice levels. They would all be completely conceptual, however, allowing for the team to develop/alter them based on ease of narrative and programming. At the moment I'm thinking of a Deforestation level (pretty much the one in the Stencyl demo) where the primary obstacles are breaks in the conveyor belts and stray buzz saws. There could be a Refinery level with oil slicks and burning oil, an Engine level with pistons, grease, flares and overheating panels, a Garbage level with toxic waste and landfill and a Spirit level. The Spirit level would be the final level where Voodude runs all the souls he's collected to the earth's core to keep them safe, running from the corruption or disintegrating world behind him.

Like a Record, Baby

Right round. Round, round. Good music. I got the world to cycle slowly with the conveyor belts to pull inwards as well. The pulsing glow was removed from the centre however, because I didn't want to distract from the saw blades spinning.

The fuel gauge gradually turns red as well. It's current rate of change is 0.025 degrees per iteration which gives for roughly a 1:35s game time for the level if the player gets a perfect run and no souls are lost. I have yet to decide how long each level should be but I'll make it a bit faster for the prototype so the change in the bar's colour is more obvious.