Spiritwood

Our target audience are players who are above 6 years old, and we hope it could be enjoyable for people across different age ranges. We intentionally chose to have our character be a female to encourage female players in this traditionally male-oriented platform game. Additionally, this game is meant for players who enjoy puzzle-platforming mechanics and a cute 8-bit aesthetic. Our movement is slow by design, as we want players to explore their surroundings, and focus on thinking about each puzzle rather than their movement.

The main types of fun for our game are challenge and discovery. As a platform game by design, we want our players to have fun cracking the levels and gain a sense of achievement by completing the puzzles. Specifically, we created interesting mechanics (described in the core mechanic section) that will force players to think about when to click what buttons in order to reach the end of each level. Moreover, our game gives players the freedom to explore their environment, talk to many different animals, and discover her mission in the game, and what kind of special power she has.

We all liked the idea of small, puzzle/platforming levels in the forest that the player had to work through to. We wanted to make a very refined level or two, showing off the core and flare features of the game. This meant we could focus a lot on developing art and coding a game that felt very beautiful and natural to play. Since the "spirit" theme was so prevalent in the early stages of brainstorming, we wanted to make a "spirit" mechanic. This resulted in us mixing our theme with our mechanics for the first time: The player could pick up spirit wood in each level and use it (like a consumable) to go into spirit mode.

Below is the moodboard I created, which helped me create a colour palette and aesthetic to inform our visual theme. We kept much of this in the final design.

We wanted a story that resonates with the need to enter "spirit mode" and enables the player to talk to animals. We went with a story that starts with an amnesiac character waking up in the forest to the animals watching her. Knowing that it was another human (a warlock) who had turned half the forest to evil and chaos, they approach her as a potential saviour who can harness the power of spirit wood.

We wanted to make it so that it made sense for only humans to be able to influence the souls of animals with spirit magic. Thus, the same way the warlock turned many animals evil, it is our character's task to free the captured souls of the "dark" animals.

Finally, we chose the animals' tone to be friendly with different personalities. For example, master Oogway is wise, while the other animals are mostly in distress. This creates a welcome yet urgent atmosphere for the player to help them save the forest.

Since we decided to make a digital game and flesh out some cool puzzle mechanics, we knew we would need to ration our time wisely. Thus, we turned to 8-bit art, which most of us had no experience with. But, after some YouTube tutorials and some trial and error, every member in our P2 team was cranking out game art. Janet specialized in character development and animation, I focused on our animals, backgrounds, and in-game platforms, and Eli created the broader lobby map and map features.

Our main character is a girl with forest-themed clothes: a red hat and green clothes.

Other characters are all animals, including Master Oogway who gives hints to players during the game, a bunny, a squirrel, a deer, and a bear. There are also dark animals who are controlled by dark powers such as dark bunnies and dark snakes.

We wanted to give the player multiple ways to play the game and uncover the story. If a player just wants to enjoy the puzzles and doesn't care much for a story, after the quick required dialog at the start of the game, no other dialog is mandatory. However, if players want to enjoy the open world lobby, understand the narrative, and immerse themselves in the environment, they can interact with animals all over the lobby to uncover the story.

We wanted to have multiple avenues of feedback for players to understand what is happening in the game. For example, we noticed that, at first, our platforms blended in with our background too much, which would be indistinguishable for people with impaired vision. To counteract this, we made our platforms thicker and reduced the exposure of our background. We also added an animated halo around items with "spirit" qualities, making it clear to the player that it is different from regular interactable objects. Finally, the opacity of inactive elements such as platforms gives the player additional cues as to where they are able to jump.

Additionally, we added jump sounds for players who rely more on auditory feedback. The same goes for picking up spirit orbs, which make a rustling sound. This makes sure that we have strong feedback both visually and auditorily for players who are not fully able to rely on one or the other. We also added a "?" toggle to the top right of the screen to clarify the controls of the game for players who don't necessarily have experience in these kinds of games. The toggle explains how to use E, space, and the WASD controls for players to refer to. The spiritwood inventory on the top-right also bobs up and down for additional visual feedback, showing that it is a collectible that can be used in the game.

To have ludo-narrative cohesion with our level design, we made it so the player is able to use the spirit wood to (1) interact with spirit objects and (2) save the souls of the animals. The level is only done when the player "saves" all the animals, making the flag less translucent and signaling that they are able to finish the level.

For this, Eli hand-drew the levels and we talked about how it would make sense for the player to be forced to choose to use their spirit mode at the right time. By moving around platforms, thinking about where spirit activation would make sense, and considering how to make it a challenge for all animals to be saved, we were able to craft some levels with medium difficulty, so that the player would be pushed to think about how to correctly use the mechanics of the game.

Our game went through several iterations based on playtesting feedback. We started with a basic structure and gradually refined the mechanics, visuals, and player experience.

Although our game has no direct social commentary embedded in it, we did make subtle choices while thinking about its broader impact. For one, we wanted our main character to be female. We wanted to make this choice to contribute to normalizing a female default character in an industry still largely dominated by male characters presented as the sole option.

Additionally, the storyline of the game actually has metaphors that underpin themes of human-versus-nature and sustainability. The warlock who harnessed the spirit power then turned against the forest represents humanity harnessing the power of nature to use it for its destruction. Our main character symbolizes the hope for humanity to rectify its past mistakes and cooperate with nature to undo the damage it has done.