Pyrelands
Pyrelands is a 2 minute long, single player adventure game in which the player explores the Pyrelands, the funerary islands of Oodaaq and Reydo, the creator gods of the game universe.
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April 2016
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Created during Carnegie Mellon University's 2D Animation and Programming for Game Designer's courses
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Unity3D (code), 2 minute experience
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Music by Adam Guthrie
Pre-Production
The game took about a month to create. I began with a designs for a narrative reward system to replace an item based inventory. The game would reward puzzle and plot advancements with a small piece of the subplot. I then mapped the narrative and puzzle steps using a puzzle depency chart. I simultaneously drew character and environment concept sketches to allow for cross contamination of narrative and visual design.
Iterations
Characters
Animation
Assets
Gameplay
In the first iterations of the game, players could walk the characters through the scene using WASD and iteract with objects by clicking. There was also a teleport feature: players could click and hold to turn the characters into a glowing ball of energy, and then release their click in their desired location to have the characters reform there. After three rounds of playtesting, I removed the teleporting function altogether. Players had a hard time intuitively finding that feature, and found it confusing when they tried to teleport out of bounds of the map (the game sent you to the central stone.) The teleportation also rendered walking obsolete, which took away from the slow, solemn nature of the game. Players also expressed a desire for consistency with controls, so I removed clicking to interact. Instead, players can move about using WASD and interact with a nearby object by pressing SPACE.
