Arcanima

The Concept Phase

• The beginning of project was quite different from what we ended up creating; originally an idea for a 2D platformer Metroidvania game.

• I worked alongside our other designer to generate potential ideas for abilities & narrative context themed around the Tarot. The story concepts we wrote in this phase went on to shape a lot of our development, as we built the game and its mechanics after the themes and story we wished to tell.

• After some iteration, we ultimately decided to pursue a puzzle focused game with an isometric perspective, and I set out to design our first core playable experience: The One Room.

• I built the initial play space in Unity's editor, carefully tweaking the placement of all objects and effects by hand.

• With only 1 real puzzle mechanic, and an additional overarching goal for the environment, this first build was fairly simple and left room for revision and expansion based on some core take-aways:

  • We wished to pursue mobile development for the game.

  • The environment was too large & time consuming for a mobile puzzle experience.

  • We were free to expand upon the foundation with new mechanics.

  • We needed a way to build, test, and iterate upon levels quickly.

Semester 1: Systems & Levels

• After the initial phase of development, I spent the rest of the first semester designing new puzzle mechanics and developing the levels for the game.

• My favorite of which was our Shadow mechanic, tied to the Moon Tarot card. Some core themes of the Moon card which I drew inspiration from were self actualization, confronting your "shadow self", and the reminder that fears are illusions. With those ideas in mind, I designed the Shadow: a reflection of the player character who followed all the same game rules as them, but moved in the opposite direction of the player's inputs. The Shadow was able to interact with game objects in the same way the player character could, and a challenge embedded into the design was that if either the Shadow or the player character were blocked from moving into a space, neither was able to move.

• To build upon the idea of fears as illusions, I designed the Barrier mechanic. The Barriers come in two variants: Thorns and Grasping Shadows, both of which are meant to look like they could harm the player. However, this is only a perception. In reality, the player character can walk through the Grasping Shadows unimpeded, but is blocked by the Thorns, and the Shadow operates in the opposite manner. This allowed for the creation of a set of puzzles where the positioning of the player character and the Shadow were the main challenge, and a mechanical tie in to the themes we wished to explore.

Semester 2: Narrative & Leadership

• While our developments in the first semester were quite exciting and successful, we found that our vague narrative was not coming across all that strongly to players, and as a team we wished to focus on delivering our story more, since we had built many of the ideas for the game's mechanics and art from those ideas.

• One of my main responsibilities during this phase of development became writing and implementing character interactions with branching choices: totaling 25 conversations and 294 lines of dialogue.

  • For each character I worked with the other designers, and one of our lead artist who served as our resident Tarot expert, to distil character traits out of the themes of different cards from the Major arcana, in order to establish motivations & purpose within the narrative, and each character's tone of voice / manner of speech.

  • Some of the characters I helped to write or revise dialogue for included:

    •  The Magician: a wise and expositional representation of what the player character will grow up to become.

    • The Sun: a bubbly child with a love for life and putting on a smile even when it hurts.

    • The Empress: a representation of the character's dead mother who is able to give her final goodbyes.

    • The Hierophant: an elderly priest who delivers advice in the form of Haikus.

• I was also designated as the Lead Designer by my team, which doubled in size from the first semester. Because of the increased number of people, we needed to split up the close knit group into proper disciplines of Design, Tech, Production, and Art, with the Leads working to facilitate communication between the disciplines, and working to make sure their own discipline wasn't encountering any major issues.

• As Lead Designer I led weekly team meetings where we evaluated testing feedback, updated documentation to be inline with our current vision of the game, made plans for what each designer would work on that sprint, and of course worked with my discipline to create and iterate upon the core mechanics of the game.