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Contrive
Freshman Project (DigiPen Singapore) Summary: Contrive is a 2D puzzle platformer where the player manipulates the environment to solve puzzles. You play as Wahyt, a mouse who wakes up in an unknown place. The earth is trembling. You see a strange device nearby that catches your eye. Upon meddling with the device, you then realize that you are able to manipulate and rotate your environment to help you construct a path to the exit. You hope that one of them will lead you home. Role: Lead Designer in a team of three Tasks: Directed the game design and managed a team of three people Designed and implemented almost all of the 7 levels Designed and play-tested the levels in an Excel spreadsheet Implemented core gameplay mechanic Wrote the story and the logs players can find in the game Reflections: When I first entered DigiPen, I had no prior experiences with coding in C or any sort of game engine, let alone making an entire game. This first semester was a roller-coaster ride as we started working on this game. We also learned the language from scratch, while implementing the game at the same time. The challenges provided by this experience was nothing I've faced, before which motivated me to challenge myself and try to overcome all the obstacles thrown my way when making this game. It made the making of this game immensely satisfying. I picked up on the idea on how a game works pretty early on in the semester, which helped me quickly prototype the core mechanics of the game and also a sample level. Through play-testing, my team noticed that the game mechanics were really easily understood and well received. However, the level design proved to be the weakest link. That forced me to rapidly iterate on the different levels I'd built, play testing them and then evaluating the play-testing results as a team. The game story was my escape from the constant level designing. It was heavily inspired by mystery TV shows, including Lost and Twin Peaks. I designed it in such a way that it isn't a "shove it in your face" kind of thing but something the player can choose to immerse themselves in or ignore completely. Overall, I enjoyed the experience of working on a team, collaborating on a common vision and working towards the same goal. |
