Escape the Castle

Essence Statement

A 3D single player game where the player, a dragon who has been stripped of his powers and captured, must use only the jump function to escape by avoiding obstacles throughout the magical castle grounds.

Project Overview

The broad concept of my game is a 3D single player game where the player must use only the jump function to reach the goal point by avoiding obstacles. A secondary goal of collecting items is utilized in a couple levels. The players main interaction is in planning the timing of their jumps in order to assure their safety through each level.

The story concept for my game is a captured dragon who is trying to escape the magical castle grounds in order to regain his power and his freedom. The player begins in the basement (level 1, level 2), then goes to the inside of the main castle (level 3), then reaches the stone keep and moat (level 4), before finally reaching the forest (level 5). The magical theme heavily influenced the assets and the overall storyline of the game. Throughout the levels, the player experiences floating lamps, flowing lava, evil spiders, and glowing particles. The theme also drives the game play as the dragon searches for his magical powers while being surrounded by magical objects. The user engages with this by escaping enemies and traps, hoping to help themselves as the small dragon.

Project Reflection and Play testing Information

Making the levels, I knew I wanted them to tell a story. I had a clear plot in my head of a captured player trying to escape a castle. As  I began finding assets and building environments, I decided to make it a trapped dragon escaping a magical castle. The theme for my game was magical and I tried to integrate it as much as I could. This included the overall storyline and all the aesthetics of the game. I wanted each level to be obviously different from the last with changing locations and new assets, but still wanted it all to feel cohesive. The plot helped a lot with this because it made sense to me to have the player move from the bottom of the castle, to the main castle, to the outdoors. I had a bit of trouble deciding the enemy or danger of each level as it didn’t make sense to have only lava all the way through the game. I eventually settled on similar aspects like missing floor boards or fallen branches. During play testing, I realized how tight my camera angles were and spent a lot of time trying to adjust them to give the player ample time to avoid an enemy. I had trouble with this as zooming to far from the player took away from the experience, but staying too close made the levels much harder than they should be. I also found that people had more trouble with the jumps than I had anticipated, I tried to counter this by adjusting height jump and length a bit. My levels, especially the latter two, really had trouble with proper rendering. They load incredibly slow and it really takes away from the experience. By reducing assets and scene size, I was able to fix this a little but they are still much slower than I had hoped and I wasn’t able to develop them as much as I had planned. 

Core Gameplay Mechanics

The player experiences three main sources of danger:

• Platform holes (lava, missing floorboards, etc) which requires simple platform jumping to avoid falling into the holes.
• Moving Enemies (spiders) which require timed jumping that has a unique position in each level playthrough depending on how long each challenge takes the player.
• Stand still obstacles (tree branches) which require timed jumping.

The player must use the jumping mechanic to avoid all three sources of danger. Timing and precision must be put in to account during game play.

The player also must acquire items:

• Keys which require using timing of spinning and accuracy of jump direction.

This provides a unique game technique as most of this game is spent avoiding things, yet here you are aiming for something.

Goals of the Game

• Game aims to tell the story of the captured dragon as he escapes the castle, and get the player invested in the story.
• The gameplay should engage the player and provide a sense of magic and adventure.
• The game should provide a decent challenge, easy enough for anyone to beat with a little practice but not so easy it is boring.

Credits:

For this project I personally made a few of the assets. These include the lava and flickering light shaders (using Shader Forge), the wall and floor texture in levels 1 and 2, the terrain and trees in levels 4 and 5, and the animations for all moving objects.

Other assets came from purchased kits on the asset store.

Asset Packs Used:

-Gloomy Animal (Dragon Character)

-Fantasy Treasure Pack Lite

-Fantasy Spider pack

-Medical Town Exteriors

-Procore/ Polybrush

-ShaderForge

-Dark Fantasy Kit by Runemark studio

-Start forest kit

-StoneKeep kit