Desaturation
Quick Overview:
During February 2018, I attended the Art Games Game Jam organized by the Goethe Institut in Athens, Greece. The theme of the GameJam was very loosely defined as "Political in nature".
Our interpretation of that kinda "open" theme came into being with Desaturation, a short 10-minute narrative-driven Puzzle FPS game.
In this game, the player takes control of a being that has been lost on a mountain trail and ends up in an abandoned town that has lost it's color, it's residents turned into husks of their former selves and silence and mist cover the mountainous hills.
Once upon the village, the player is tasked with finding orbs of sound, big spheres emanating music, a metaphor for life. Once he finds these orbs he returns them to the town, and once placed, color and sound returns to the world around you. When the player collects all orbs, a portal opens across the lake and the player enters it as the game ends.
The lead art design of the game was influenced by FPS horror and puzzle games like Amnesia, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and The Witness.
We used a low-poly aesthetic, to facilitate the creation of a large world and custom assets very quickly, and followed it with somber piano music to build tension.
Project Goals:
The main goals of this project where:
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Create a short, exploration-driven experience
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Complete the project by the deadline of the GameJam
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Experiment with Low Poly Level design and Materials
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Take another shot at FPS environmental storytelling
My role in this project:
My roles in the project:
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Level Design
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Game Design
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Story
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Lighting & Material Design
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Project Management
Post-Mortem:
The project went great in general, we did have some issues (what jam doesn't?), but we mostly managed to overcome them. We did have a last minute game-breaking crash that didn't let me present the game in-engine, so we had to present with a video just like the other teams.
But honestly, the team performed admirably, and we even managed to work with two random artists to bring the 3D models to life, who where friends of friends we had never met or worked with before. Luckily they turned out to be very talented and teamwork oriented people, chucking out models faster than I could import them and adding to the project creatively and conceptually. You can check out their portfolios here:
Zannis Bafaloukos: Portfolio
Canislav Pavlovski: Portfolio
In retrospect, there are a few things I would've changed honestly, but in no way would I say that they heavily impacted the outcome of the game.
On the outset, my chief concern should've been team-size. We didn't really know how to work together, as we had two programmers from the mobile (Unity) segment of our studio and one from the UE4 one, so they didn't really know how to communicate or have a good workflow on UE4.
As per usual, there could've been many improvements on the project management side of the jam, scoped too high at the beginning, managed to adapt and cut down scope very quickly though. On the other hand, we didn't conceptualize enough at the beginning, which delayed us down the line, leaving a lot of "easy" polish unfinished because we had to spend a lot more time individually answering design questions that could've been answered at the outset if we had focused during brainstorming and realized and cut scope earlier, leaving time for conceptualization and top-level designing the various segments of the game
That being said, those where the only problems with the project. On a personal level, I was quite pleased with my work in low-poly level design, it had been a long time since I sculpted and designed a level in this manner and the experience was very frustrating at times, but quite rewarding.
We even managed to snag a few good screenshots with a pretty pleasant composition
In all honesty, Desaturation was a success, for GameJam standards that is.
I did have a great time in that Jam, having spent too much time working on Taco Gun before (and after) that, Desaturation was a very rewarding and creative break, helping me gain some perspective and refocus my efforts on other projects I was working on at the time.
You can check out our itch.io page for Desaturation here.
You can check out other games created during the Art Games Jam here.
