elakoii✿
eager to give and love.
BENEATH THE MASK
Putnik, an aspiring game designer, gets sucked into his PC and spawns in an unknown universe. Upon meeting several inhabitants of various regions, he comes to understand the connection between all of them until he realizes he, too, is a part of them.
PROJECT REQUIREMENTS:
• Enhance one’s cultural awareness through wayfinding
• Use GameMaker Studio 2
GENRE:
RPG, Cultural
TEAM:
5
DURATION:
8 Weeks
ROLES:
Project Manager, Lead Designer, Level Designer, Writer, Character Artist, Animator, UI Artist, Sound Designer
GAME ENGINE:
GameMaker Studio 2
CONTRIBUTION OVERVIEW
• Lead the team through pre-production and production phases
• Fully designed the game’s concept and level progression
• Wrote the script
• Designed and animated all characters
• Made UI, collectibles, and portals
• Made the loopable game soundtrack
CHARACTER ART
DESIGN & WRITING
The challenge with this project mainly concerned the following:
How do you raise cultural awareness without presenting stereotypes?
Wayfinding culture is difficult in the sense that you have the choice to risk inventing a culture to get the user to read into it or educating them on an existing culture.
In order to avoid the risk part, I decided to draw the connection between the game design industry and certain cultures since our target audience was 1st year international game design students at our university. Representing each character by mask also eliminated stereotype; therefore, their designs become inspired by the cultures they represent.
Doing this plays with the focus between the two concepts: the characters mainly express their cultures through the dialogue, yet small details about their role revealed in what they say is needed to complete the last puzzle where the topic is related to game design.
Basically, all characters speak of who they have a connection to, which is the key to answering the final boss about the pairs in game design.
At the start, users should immediately catch on that Putnik is the Designer role of the world. Hence why the Writer says this:
Being able to draw these connections was a bit hard without having the ability bar as visual aid to the main concept. Unfortunately, working in GameMaker made it difficult for us to implement these important elements.
