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An easy overview of the structure of our game.

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Merry Christmas!

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Visual Appearance and Level Design

General Mood

We wanted to create a mostly dark and atmospheric but still charming game world – a world in which humanity is long gone but its impact still visible. Remains of the futuristic society lie in ruin and are decaying while the flora and fauna claims back the world – a classical post-apocalyptic scenery. While establishing a rather dark mood the presence of light was important to us and since the game shouldn’t feel like a horror game the balance between dystopian sci-fi and colourful scenery was a challenge.

The levels start rather simple and gain on complexity while the player progresses throughout the game. New obstacles should require the player to adapt with his newly acquired equipment and also reaction and decision making will become more relevant as new enemies and obstacles make it harder to collect the energy orbs necessary to activate the terminal in the end of each level. At the end of each area a new part for IDO is unlocked. Its mechanics are explained and established in the following levels and finally extend the possibilities for more complex level designs.

Starting Area

The Laboratory

The first levels should establish the general mood of the game but not feel too threatening. Light floods the destructed environment and leads the player to the first obstacles and energy orbs. The combination of devastated environment and calm light had quite an important role in the first level designs. From the starting area the path leads deeper down into the facility. While the daylight is decreasing artificial light sources lighten the way to the end of each level. The flora which has developed within the depths of the facility becomes more noticeable. Mushrooms glow in the dark and release its spores creating a misty atmosphere.

Later Levels

Flooded Reactor

This area was a fantastic opportunity to establish new mutated animals and plants as enemies and to bring more life into the badlands. The flooded area requires the player to make use of one of the different drives IDO can be equipped with. The colour scheme remains at green, only the rust-red walls are used as colour contrast. While in the beginning glaring lights from the ceiling light the way later in the level radioactive fish eggs provide the necessary brightness.

The first enemy the player encounters in this level is a mutated fish trying to eat him. The creature can be bypassed by using a boost – an ability which comes with the propeller drive, or it can be blinded with the flashlight module. The second obstacles would be the water plants slowing the movement and dragging down the player if he remains too long between them. Those plants also have another variant which releases its seamine-like seeds causing an explosion if the player gets in contact with them. The player should also keep his distance from the radioactive fish eggs or IDO will receive radiation damage.

The Factory

Since in our story GOD will activate the whole facility and start to produce new operator drones IDO will encounter more android enemies. One of the areas IDO will pass through is the factory where the drones are assembled. A special equipment makes it possible to attach to the assembly line only allowing to switch position from top to bottom. The player needs to avoid the welding robots and terrain as well as the security turrets. The level should portray a threatening industrial environment in which every wrong move will have consequences.

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Golden Pineapple Award

Thank you so much for having us! The whole team was really nervous about the presentation, but we managed to pull it off and got the golden pineapple for best graphics. We’re very proud of our game concept for I.D.O. and so thankful for the amazing work of our game artist David. Thank you guys so much for following our journey thus far!

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Character Design and Equipment

Very soon in the process of creating our main character we decided on a basic geometric shape. The sphere as silhouette functions as an iconic form, while the general appearance of our character is changeable throughout the game. But we needed another key visual to keep the character recognizable even when equipped differently. We decided to include the plus-shaped recess for the face of our hero in all other models as well. Additionally this shape has a positive connotation and makes it possible to differentiate from other sci-fi designs.

Another question we asked ourselves was: How do we create sympathy for this character? We tried multiple designs which didn’t quite work since they didn’t have any features a player could relate to. Most of the early designs just felt like the artificial robots they were. We decided to portray the child-like character of our protagonist with charming googly eyes and proportions which stimulate an emotional bonding between player and game character – we basically made IDO look cute.

Character Response

Since IDO is the vessel of all human emotions we also looked for a way for IDO to express simple thoughts and feelings without using language and found an additional key visual we could use not only for marketing purposes. The hologram projection look was also used in the UI designs.

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Implementation

IDO was developed in Unity. Unity’s graphic fidelity and its high-quality rendering of 3D graphics are well suited to the high-resolution graphics used in IDO. IDO was built to both android and iOS devices so that Unity’s ability to support multiple platforms further commended it as a game engine. All of Unity’s UI elements work on touchscreen by default so that Unity is especially useful for mobile game development.

IDO was built to both android and iOS devices. In order to make IDO available on the App Store the games certificates were configured using the Apple Developer Portal. The simple, clear explanations of APIs Scripting manual, the code and prefabs available in its asset store and the strong community around Unity reduce the level of coding ability required to produce high quality games to the point that we felt that was within our abilities to code the game ourselves, thus reducing our budget.

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The Puzzles

At the end of each level there is a terminal where the player has to solve a puzzle which gives simple insight into a STEM category. The puzzles are intended to captivate the players and awaken their interest in the subject. To activate the terminal, the player has to collect every energy orb in the level. The amount of energy orbs depend on complexity and length of the level and in this means give information about the players progress. Once he collected them all, the player activates the terminal and receives access to the puzzle, where for example either a circuit must be closed, a binary code needs to be translated or a beam of light has to be properly bundled through different lenses to proceed.

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The RoboLab

The RoboLab is the place where the players can equip I.D.O. with different parts. There are 4 different part categories: I.D.O.s case, his visual receivers, his drive and additional modifiers. If the players click on the icon of a part they already unlocked, it will equip and the players get a short description of it. Every part gives I.D.O. a different ability. To solve all of the levels, the players have to combine the right parts and use their mechanics. The RoboLab can be accessed any time during the levels, which allows us to build complex and challenging environments.

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Ingame Mockups.

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Level selection.

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Personas

Julia (20)

Julia took a biosphere to her fourth-grade science fare. In primary school she learned all the poisonous snakes in Australia off by heart. Her favourite part of Science class were the life cycles of guppies and pea plants.

In middle school she started to fall behind in maths and never caught up. Chemistry and Physics sounded good in the beginning but then they too started to look suspiciously like maths. In high school she specialized in English and Spanish and skipped as many sciences as she could without dropping out.

Now Julia watches science fiction series, reads comics and pop science articles about space. She follows NASA on twitter and occasionally looks up things they mention on google scholar. She does not play any computer games but she plays platform games on her phone when she is waiting at bus stops or train stations.

Henry (23)

For fifth grad art class Henry drew a picture of an overweight child being devoured by a McDonalds. Several of his drawings ended up in the school newspaper which he was editing by the time he reached high school. His favourite subject was human geography, because (it was political and based in empirical data) of the context it gave his view of globalisation. In high school Henry led a demonstration against the school cafeterias use of nestle products on the grounds of their unethical business practices. He was in a band.

Henry never liked science but never actively disliked it either. Throughout his school career his maths and science scores were average.

Now Henry watches movies and documentaries on social issues and reads political speculative fiction. He spends most of his time playing Fallout as his grades in his political studies major gradually decline.

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User Interface

At the top left, there’s a pause button, where the players can pause the game, restart the level, access the options menu and exit to the title screen. At the top, the players can find a bar, which shows them how many energy orbs they already collected and how many there are in total. The controls of our game are inspired by multiple mobile shooter games, which use virtual joysticks and action buttons. The joystick lets the players easily move around depending on which drive I.D.O. has equipped at the moment. On the right side of the screen, there’s a big button for accessing the RoboLab and around it are the action buttons, depending on which parts I.D.O. is currently using. The composition of the buttons and the joystick lets the players smoothly navigate and interact with the game, while only using their thumbs. The layout of our game is designed to fit on any device, with special focus on the iPhone X, because of its notch.

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We really like this one~

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Criteria for player enjoyment in games. We pitched our game to a fellow student from another group and she filled of this form for use. 

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Options and pause screen

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The finished RoboLab. The lit icons are the equipment I.D.O. is wearing. If you click on an icon the upgrade will equip and G.O.D. will give a short description of it.

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Finished look of the entrance to the game.