Slothomancer
A mobile puzzle game

PROJECT OVERVIEW

The team:

3 Level Designers
4 Game Artists
5 Game Programmers

Production time:

5 weeks half-time

Engine:

Unity

My Contribution:

Game Design
Worldbuilding & Story
Puzzle Design
Level Art

Project Thoughts

This is one of the group projects that i've worked on at TGA that i'm really excited to write about!

We wanted to do Lemmings, but the problem with Lemmings is that it's fun when they die; but you get punished for it.

So I suggested that we do Lara Croft:go - except there's a bunch of Lara Crofts and they die all the time, and you get rewarded for it.

Theme/Setting

Someone suggested a lazy necromancer that has his minions do everything for him; perfect. But skeletons didn't really sell the sadism we wanted to push: Tormented spirits of peasants that scream in agony, conquered subjects: this fit the M.O. way better.

One day we decided he's a victorious villain, with no one left to fight.

Like an ancient dragon lying on it's hoard, except really sad, dirty and depressed.

So we filled the game with trash. Then we took the previous game projects characters as fallen heroes and decided to put them in the trash as collectibles.

Design Pillars

A core design pillar was to make it fun, rewarding and necessary to kill the ghosts. To quote the game design document:

'A goal from playtesting should be that the trial/error part of the puzzles should still be fun, sacrificing ghosts on purpose, restarting and doing it again; pushing for poor telegraphing and information in the puzzles for the sake of inflicting maximum pain on the ghosts'

I wanted to design a scenario where someone realized they failed the puzzle, and took it out on the ghosts. It worked!

When a person started the game they felt sorry for the ghosts; but gradually the inherent frustration with the puzzles turned into a slowly building apathy towards the ghosts, and made the players play more and more like the Slothomancer.

Even if its just a small puzzle game we made in a few weeks, in terms of design intent and execution - I'm very proud of what we accomplished!