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The Little Shadows
DESCRIPTION
The Little Shadows concept design for a 2.5D game where 2 players use a wand and a flashlight to help find ghosts in a mystical forest.
ROLE
Lead Game Designer, Visual Artist, Level Designer
TEAM
4
DURATION
2 months (2023)
TOOLS USED
Unity, C#, Blender, arduino
Game Direction
Core Pillars
My main role in this concept project served as a game designer, visual artist, and level designer. Apart from our main roles, we all had interchangeable duties and contributions as Game Design leads where we created the game flow and mechanics, and communicated about different ways to implement the controllers into this game.
As the main visual artist, I was in charge of creating concept sketches for how the game look and feel was going to be. I worked closely with the other artist in the team to communicate back and forth for the color aesthetics and collectively agree with a theme/inspiration picture for how we want the world build to look like.
Idea sketch 1
Idea sketch 2
Initial Idea
Our initial idea was to create a game and submit it to GDC. We wanted to combine a physical element with our 2.5D game where 2 players, using the 2 controllers, must work together to find and capture the monster. Given the space we saw in the GDC criteria, we chose to use 3 walls as the whole game world space where the players can walk around and physically move around. 1 person being in charge of connecting the game to Arduino and working on the physical sensors, the other person being in charge of coding, another person in charge of the UI/UX portion of the game, and me being in charge of the art assets and level design.
Inspiration
Inspiration 1
Inspiration 2
Inspirations
Using the inspiration images on top, the other artist and I started concept sketching some ideas of how we want the game to look. We started off with color schemes, and then chose to sketch out how the game view was going to be. 2D, 2.5D, 3D, Top down, platformer. We had a lot of options but had to carefully think about our time to make it in time to submit for GDC.
Color Scheme
A lot of the color scheme that the team and I agreed on was trying to match the inspiration pictures. The slight purple, blue-ish feel gives off mysterious and mystical vibes. The whole premise of this forest that we were planning on was similar to that vibe.
I made another color scheme to try to go against(?) or not fully copy the inspiration pics. The green to match the normal forest vibes but that would make the forest look too generic or boring.
Concept Sketches / Direction
I made a few sketches that I thought would make the game experience a bit playful and creative.
1. An angled 3D top down and using tilemaps to make the level design a bit easier on my part.
2. I thought having the world built using square blocks would make it really fun too. I've never really played or encountered many games with this type of build. Then the floor would change on a RNG mechanic where the players would be challenged to figure out how the floors would develop.
3. Last but not least, the easy top-down view where it is just easier for the players on trying to play a hide and seek game with the monsters. The yellow circles represent the light and trying to find monsters using the physical controller that the other team member was making.
Low Fidelity Sketch 1
Final Decision/High Fidelity Sketch
Ultimately, the team and I both chose to agree on a 2.5D platformer where there are 3 different layers (front, middle, background) so that the monsters have a chance to hide in different places, it makes the gameplay a little more playful and engaging. Choosing the dark blue/purple color scheme, we made a very basic sketch of how we want the forest to look like. With this basic sketch, we can then have an idea of how we want the mood/feel of the forest.
Low Fidelity Sketch 2
Final Sketch
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