Edda's Conquest

Summary

Edda's Conquest is the second game I developed at The Game Assembly. It is a point-and-click adventure game with the gameplay consisting of the player walking around beautiful, hand-painted environments, using items and dialogue to solve puzzles and save a viking village from a devastating attack.

Specifications

Created in 8 weeks half-time
Team consisting of 2 level designers, 3 artists and 6 programmers
Using the in-house game engine TGA 2D
Puzzles and dialogue scripted using json

My contributions

Level Design
Game Design
Puzzle design and implementation
Narrative design and implementation

Developing our game-making skills

While creating Edda's conquest, all of us had learned some design lessons from our previous game and we had a lot better grasp of what it would take to make a game collaboratively. In this project much like in my previous one, Dunkelheit, we worked hard to maintain a common vision of the game. However, we divided the work very efficiently, with me and William taking a great deal of charge of the story, preproduction and planning, always having a blueprint ready so that the rest of the group knew what the next step was in the story.

Problems and lessons learned

We did fall a little bit too much in love with our story of the little viking, coming up with too many good puzzle ideas to leave any out. As such, we fell into the dangerous trap of overscoping. This project is where I learned the lesson that cutting extra content is better than having unpolished content in the game. I also learned the value of playtesting, since sometimes our ideas were just a little too complicated for the average player.

However, our work process, collaboration and planning were all on a really good level, and I feel like this was the project where I really started evolving as a designer. For the scope that we had, I am so proud of the final result!

Design methods

One area where I really evolved during this project was in my collaboration with the graphical artists. This was the first project where mockups in Maya was part of my workflow, and I feel like the way we worked with it was very good. We ended up naming and color coding the entire scene, with special colors for the important items, and sent the scene along with a document describing what was important for each color-coded item. This process enabled us to communicate our vision clearly as well as setting important specifications such as sizes of objects, while still allowing the artists a lot of creative freedom.

This was also the first project where I started scripting, discovering the area that would become my passion. A lot of the puzzles were made by us turning off and on certain items through scripting, making it seem to the player like the objects were changing. I still remember my delight when I realized what kind of player illusions I could create simply by turning off and on certain items, such as "imprisoned cat" --> "chain disappears from the cat" -->"freed cat" --> "happy cat"! The player would think that it was the same object changing, while in reality it was just a bunch of different objects with the same name.

Conclusion

Despite overscoping, I am very proud of this final product. However, the product that we had when it was time for hand in was barely complete, and I learned a huge lesson from that fact. But when everything came together in the end, we had a beautiful, immersive game.

I feel like this is one of the projects where I evolved the most and also one of the ones I was the most invested in. All of us fell completely in love with the little viking who was blessed by the gods with a portable altar, and I feel like we made an awesome game that made her justice.

Edda’s Conquest