The Atlas: Prologue

 

The Atlas: Prologue is the UCSC 2020 Undergraduate Game Design Major Final Project of team Shanhe Studio.

Link to download the demo:

https://haobin-zhang.itch.io/the-atlas-prologue

 

Abstract:

    • The Atlas: Prologue includes the tutorial level and the first level of the full gameplay. It’s an ink painting style 2D Puzzle RPG game in which you act as a young wizard, who cultivates Taoism in order to become a real immortal, to save your teacher ‘The Master’. In the game, players will use talismans, a magic tool, to cast different spells to overcome all the difficulties in the journey. The answer can be easy as long as you understand the inner logic and philosophy of the five basic elements!
    • Awards:

      • Visual Art Award, University of California Santa Cruz Sammy Showcase 2020

 

 

 

 

      • Peer Choice Award, University of California Santa Cruz Sammy Showcase 2020

 

 

My role:

    • producer:

      • I organized the team with 11 members, primarily working on these listing issues mentioned below:
        1. Writing production documents including milestone plans, product backlog, sprints/recaps, and other course assignments.
        2. Managing project folder and sources.
        3. Hiring outside collaborators.
        4. Holding standups, team scrum sessions, and zoom meetings.
        5. Assigning tasks to designers, artists, sound designers, and programmers.
        6. Following up and monitoring the progress of team members.
        7. Consulting with QA teams and playtesters.
      • This is my first time being the producer of a project with more than ten team members and developing a game following a relatively professional process. Though I made some mistakes during the development, with unshakable determination and hard work day and night, we finally made it.
    • Lead Designer:

      • In the beginning, Matt, the other designer in our team, and I used ‘finding ways out of mazes’ as our core mechanics. However, due to the large workload, we had to change it to ‘figuring out the Five Elements Theory and combining elements’ to narrow down our scope.
      • Then, based on our new core mechanics, I designed the whole system, like locks and gating, and details of each puzzle. Also, I took charge of building levels in Unity, adding colliders, adjusting positions of objects, sorting layers, etc.
    • Lead Director:

      • Generally speaking, I was responsible for making final decisions on what we were going to have in our game. Besides working on mechanics, I designed mostly everything players could see in the game by drawing sketches, including UI interfaces, resources, characters, even the visual target, etc. (shown in design notes below)
      • I examined assets, sound effects, and playing experience of puzzles when they were finished and gave feedback to revise or polish.
    • Gameplay Programmer:

      • I participated in programming some simple gameplays, such as setting up triggers for dialogs and sound effects, implementing dialogs, adding interactions between talismans and other resources, debugging, etc.
    • Writer:

      • I wrote the original version of all textual contents, such as plots and dialogs, and revised them with the proofreader who was sent to help me localize the use of words and sentences.

 

Aesthetics:

    • Challenge:

      • Players need to gradually understand the Five Elements Theory, find its rule, and match the elements together according to it to create the right talisman as well as unlock more elements.
    • Discovery

      • We attempted to link different levels together to increase the connection between each part of the game, allowing the player more freedom to choose how to explore the world.
    • Sensation

      • We wanted to show players a traditional ink painting style world with eastern folk music instruments to bring them fresh audiovisual enjoyment.
      • As far as I know, there are still relatively few games in the market with the same style.
    • Fantasy

      • We were trying to provide players with a well-structured reasonable world by giving the background story before the game started.

 

Concepts:

    • Dynamic Difficulty (AI as Game modifier)

      • Overview:
        • In this game, our foremost technical goal is to complete a dynamic difficulty system for players. (That is, we will design an AI to monitor all actions of the players, including the moving distance, how many times they fail to make talismans, how many wrong moves are taken when solving a puzzle, etc, and calculate a value, analyzing data with some algorithms based on a behavior tree to measure players’ game experience. In this demo, the computer agent will generate 8 results relevant to 8 trigrams according to how skillful players are and slightly modify rules of puzzles (the walking puzzle) and even game mechanics like spells uniquely.
      •  Novelty:
        •  we think it would be really cool to give every player a unique gaming experience. What this AI project does is try to make every movement of the player have an impact on their future gameplay. So, the AI is like an omniscient observer who adds more specific difficulties, alternative solutions as well, to the game. In this way, we are always shaping the path towards the final goal.
          From the aesthetic perspective, we want the player to have a sense of fighting against their fates, which is exactly the same process as the divination in I Ching: FortuneTellings divine people’s future to be good or bad based on what they have done in the past, and people need to do something to avoid bad things from happening. So, in our game, we want the player to find and utilize those extra items or helpers that are given indirectly to solve the harder puzzles and finish the game.
          Imagine that one day we will have the 64 trigrams behavior tree done, the UX might be totally different for different players.
      • Fun bit:
        • The AI is actually observing how unskillful the player is. If the player did everything wrong tons of times, they would face the hardest puzzles later on as feedback. Normally, a game will decrease or just keep the difficulty the same if the player is not good at it; we are doing the opposite approach. Simply speaking, the game will be harder if you are a “bad” player; If you are an expert, the game will reward you by getting easier.
    • Culture Sharing

      • When designing some systems and puzzle details, we greatly referenced ancient Chinese philosophical thoughts and theories and integrate them into the game to spread the connotation of ideas in the culture.
    • Five Elements theory

      • The whole game unfolds through the five elements theory, which in ancient China was applied to various aspects of philosophy, medicine, astronomy, geography, etc. There exist generation and overcoming relationships between the five elements, which is also the key to understanding the game.

 

Development Process:

    • Prototype:

    • Team Meeting, Jam, and Scrum Review:

    • My Design Notes(preview):*

Click to view the whole design notes

    • Developing and Iterating:

    • Finalizing:

    • Advertising:

 

Production:

    • In 170 series courses, we went through the process of game development: brainstorming ideas → making prototypes → pitching → forming final teams → developing and polishing → advertising → shipping.
      • Game Genre:
        • Puzzle Game
      • Target Audience:
        • teenagers and adults who have interests in eastern history/mythology and Puzzle games.
      • Target platforms:
        • Windows & macOS
      • Project Cycle:
        • From Jan 2020 to Jun 2020
    • Project organization:
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    • Milestone Plan:

    • Project Folders and other documents:

 

Mechanics:

    • Core mechanics

      • Combining elements to draw talismans, and using them to solve puzzles
    • Core Game loop:

    • Settings:

      • Scene:
        • One scene may represent:
          1. One entire level.
          2. A complicated puzzle.
          3. The MainMenu.
          4. Special uses like ‘Credits’.

 

 

 

        • Level building logic:
          • 3D scene with 2D assets
            1. Environmental assets horizontally placed.
            2. Item assets rotated 45° upward to the camera.
            3. Colliders:
              1. Outside Collider:
              2. Inside Collider:
          • Camera:
            • Tied to the protagonist as a child gameobject.
            • 45° rotated downward to assets.
          • Scene background assets:
            • Place the background asset(s) below the main ground base of each level to cover the Unity default background.
      • Player’s action:
        • Shan (the protagonist of the game):
          • Movement
            • 8 directions with 4 spritesheets.
          • Interacting:
            • Players could left-click everywhere in the game to explore the world, along with dialogs.
          • Collecting:
            • If players left-click on any item that is collective,  the item would be collected into the backpack directly.
          • Dragging:
            • Players could press the ‘Shift’ key to drag objects that are draggable (there will be text shown beside the object) when getting close enough to them.
      • Qiang Yu (the Boss of the Water Level):
        • Qiang Yu is actually the divination simulator, the AI system mentioned above.
        • Players can meet and interact with Yu after overcoming all difficulties in the Water level, and finally receive a trigram.

 

 

 

 

 

 

      • Fei (the Boss of the Fire Level):
        • Players can meet Fei only if they choose the better solution to acquire the FIre element.

 

 

 

 

      • Scroll gates:
        • There are several scroll gates that are used for scene transition.
        • Players can simply walk into the gate to interact.

 

 

 

      • Background Story:

    • Systems:

      • Spelltree:
        • For example, players only have the earth element at the beginning of the game, all other items in the Spelltree are locked. But, when players get water element by solving a puzzle. The state of the water element changes directly from locked to unlocked, skipping the known state  (only level-1 elements follow that since they have no pre-components). Then, level-2 elements moon (combination of 2 water) and wind (combination of 1 wood and 1 water), spells Ditto Board (combination of 2 earth and 1 water) and Heavenly Water (combination of 3 water) change their states from locked to known. Simply speaking, what could be created by combining either earth or water elements (elements players already owned) will become Known.
      • Talisman:
        • Level-1 Elements:
          • Acquired by interactions and solving puzzles.
            • Earth
            • Wood
            • Water
            • Fire
            • Gold
        • Level-2 Elements:
          • Acquired by combining two of level-1 elements using the talisman (not items in the backpack).
            • Sun
            • Moon
            • Wind
            • Thunder
        • Spells:
          • Acquired by combining three of level-1 and level-2 elements using the talisman, creating items in the backpack.
            • Changeable Soil
            • Heavenly Water
            • Ditto Board
            • Yin-Yang Portal
            • Golden Wood
            • Prime Sun
            • Taiji Key
            • Taoist Wind
    • UI Interface

      • Backpack:
      • Dialog:
      • Spelltree:
      • Talisman:
    • Puzzles:

    • Controls:

      • Left-click to collect and interact with items.
      • Left-click and drag items from the backpack onto other items to interact.
      • Press WSAD to move.
      • Press Q / click the Spelltree icon to open the Spelltree UI interface.
      • Press T / click the Talisman icon to open the Talisman UI interface
        • Press G to generate the talisman
        • Press Delete to re-draw the talisman
      • Scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in / out

 

Cheat Sheet:

 

Dynamics:

    • Playtesting:

    • QA: