TEAM
Bianka Kovacs,Eunice Lim, Zac Emerzian
MY RESPONSIBILITIES
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Co-designed overall game design, art visuals.
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Programmed player controller and physics forces.
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Implemented death animations.
Origami
Origami is a 2D local multiplayer platformer, set in the Japanese paper world of origami art.
On each level, the players cooperate with each other to dispose of the paper rubbish. To achieve their goal, they must coordinate their actions and use strategies to overcome obstacles that come across their paths.
This is a project where we were given two verbs as prompts: Fold & Carry.
GENRE
2D puzzle platformer
GAME ENGINE
Unity, C#
PROJECT DETAILS
Excited by how beautiful a paper world would look, I really loved working on this project with my team! The verb constraints and two-day deadline for a prototype were an interesting challenge!
After seeing a stop motion animation of an elephant origami, we were inspired to create stop motion animations! After intense amounts of staring at GIFs and existing origami photographs, we decided on a mixed media style match our photographed assets. Between Zac Emerian's amazing level design skills and Bianka's camera skills, the game turned out extremely beautifully! The team even upgraded from a make shift home setup to a full-blown studio so we could improve on the animation quality.
I enjoyed learning about how to key frame animations, studio lighting set-ups, stop motion animation and how all of these flow through the game development pipeline into scripts.
PLAYER-CENTRIC DESIGN PROCESS
We considered the player’s existing biases and designed around them.
When playtesters saw the rabbit holding the umbrella, they expected the rabbit to be able to ride the updraft. In response, we added this as a feature to better match affordances even though it invalidated co-op play in certain levels since the rabbit could actually fly solo.
The reason the turtle and the umbrella are immune to water also stays consistent with the affordances and expectations we imagined players would have. Even the turtle was made slower in comparison to the rabbit to make it feel more realistic and heavier. We repeated the question “What would the player think?” when designing the abilities of each character and environment piece.
We were also acutely aware of visual clarity. We considered where and what a player would focus on when looking at a level. We used different values, line densities and colors in order to lead the player’s eyes. More important things such as the ball and characters had stronger saturation to make them pop out more. To communicate to the player that the ball has to go into the round goal, matched colors and added rotation animation to the goal to make it more important.
We considered the player’s learning and progression in level design. We slowly introduced mechanics as the player progresses through levels. Earlier levels do not actually require morphing. We emphasize heavily on co-op from the get go to drive in the idea that players have to work together.