Author: Christine J. Collazo

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Assignments Blog Assignment Production Assignment

“Ocular” User Testing

Most people found that my game wasn’t too hard to complete. Since I know I had some non-gamers play and respond to the form, I’m glad to know that my design wasn’t too difficult for them.

I feared that some of my audio clips wouldn’t be loud enough and when asked in my form the results showed that there weren’t really any issues with them. In the end I found my audio clips were fine the way they were.

Overall I found that the main thing I wanted to fix was to add a checkpoint feature to the game. Most of the feedback I received was positive but the players were also very upset every time they had to restart level one. I found this feature also came in handy with level two, since if the player died in level two they would reset back to one.

I also had some gems that were unobtainable, these have been removed.

I found some areas where the player would bump their heads when jumping, these have all been fixed.

For the future I’d like to work on fixing the player’s animation (walk and idle) and I would also like to work on my menu buttons and giving the player more options.

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Assignments Midterm

Midterm: “Ocular”

My game is called “Ocular” the current objective of the game is simply to collect 20 gems. In this world, the eyes control everything and are always— watching!

“Ocular: Title Menu”

Currently my title menu is a bit broken and needs a lot more work. I will be updating the art soon and fixing those looking crazy margins.

“Level One”
“Level One”

My game features a large eyed moon inspired by LoZ’s Majoria’s Mask and a medium city scape. Each building in the city has small bright red lights on each one, similar to the eyed moon and enemies.

“Enemy”
“Enemy”

I used this to try and imply that the sight of the red color, marks some sort of danger or hostile. Due to the color’s of my platforms though I feel like the danger of “red” isn’t coming across too well, so I will probably work on reworking the color schemes a bit.

“Game Over”

My game over screen also need a little fixing with the buttons being too dark and blending in with the scenery. I will most likely be redesigning all the buttons.

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Assignments Production Assignment

Obstacles & Rewards

An evil eye. Haven’t decided if this little guy should be a mini boss or just another hostile.
An eye walker. For my designs, anything with an eye is made to come off as an enemy.
Simple collectable reward to use for upgrades and inspired by Legend of Zelda.
Gem collection animation.
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Assignments Production Assignment

Platforms & Scenery

Heavily inspired by Majoira’s Mask and Little Nightmares 2, I’ve created a dark and eerie scenery for my game.
The city idea is currently inspired by Little Nightmares 2. I want it to feel like these tall building are towering over the player.
These are some platform concepts, although I ended up not liking or using the circular red platforms in the end. Not sure about my choice in colors here and so I might redesign these a little later.
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Assignments Production Assignment

Character Design

“AL’s Walk Cycle” Originally I designed my character’s using Procreate but found out the hard way that procreate and Godot don’t mix too well.
“AL’s Jump Cycle”
“AL’s Idle”
This was my original design for my character; done in Procreate.
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Blog Assignment

Grounded: Setting

Grounded is an open-world survival game being developed by Obsidian Entertainment and Xbox Game Studio. The game is still in it’s early access development stage and is only available on Windows 10 and Xbox One at this moment. The player must survive as a shrunken human in a bug infested garden, while monitoring their hunger and thirst.

Garden Setting – Telescope
Garden Setting -Lilypond (Juice box can provide a “water source”)

Grounded uses beautiful scenery to bring the garden to life making the player want to explore it even more. Throughout the garden, the player will explore and find large scaled items and trinkets which can not only help with navigating the terrain but can sometimes also provide a usefulness to the player. (Juice boxes and soda cans can provide a small amount of fluids to keep the player hydrated.)

Garden Setting – Oak Tree (Bee towards the top left)
Garden Setting – Spider fight while trying to collect Grass (I ran away lol)
Crafting Menu – Basic Tools

A large part of the game focuses on exploring the beauty of the garden and it’s setting. This can’t be done without first learning how to craft basic tools for necessary survival and also learning how to focus on keeping your players thirst and hunger meters full.

After the player has learned basic survival, they can explore the garden and terrain to find more learnable things. This also includes trying to survive against insects like solider ants, bees, mosquito’s and horrifying spiders.

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Assignments

Subnautica: Below Zero

Subnautica: Below Zero is an open world adventure game with loads of underwater exploration. The game follows Robin to planet 4546B in her pursuit to locate her missing sister. During this process she answers the distress call of a dying alien named “Al-an” who claims her body as a host. Robin then needs to find Al-an a better host while still trying to uncover what happened to her sister.

Seatruck Fragment (Unlocks Seatruck Vehicle Blueprint)
Ribbon plants: Used to craft standard batteries (Very important!)

In Subnautica the player focuses on exploring the depths of Planet 4546B and uncovering lost alien and human research stations.

PDA Warning: 30 sec of Oxygen remaining!
Squidshark: Aggressive fauna

Since the gameplay is completely underwater, the player must pay attention to their oxygen, food and water supply to stay alive. They must also watch out for many alien creatures and leviathans.

Blueprints unlock as fragments are scanned
Prawn Suit Grappling Arm Blueprint Acquired (Found from fragments)

By finding fragments and using a tool to scan them, the game rewards the player by unlocking blueprints to create better equipment and vehicles for deeper exploration.

BONUS SCREENSHOT: I just located Al-an’s first blueprint for his body!