Game prototype made for a TIGSource.com contest in 2010, inspired by the famous German tale : Der Erlkönig.
The game is implemented in Squirrel, based on a the GameStart3D engine.
Research for a character design
In october 2008, the 🐯 TigSource community organized an online game jam (known as TIGSource Contest) titled Commonplace Book Competition.
The theme of the game (was) H.P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book. This was a notebook in which Lovecraft jotted down his various ideas, many of them disjointed and cryptic; most of these musings never became real stories.
Narrator walks along unfamiliar country road,—comes to strange region of the unreal.
For this gameplay, I chose to immerse the main character (“the narrator”) in an environment that would be entirely ruled by a physics engine. While the player doesn't directly control the main character, their task is to facilitate the progression along a course (“unfamiliar country road”) with deadly obstacles. The player, by interacting with certain elements of the environment, can move them or make them disappear. The usage of physics is a major challenge in terms of character control (we can only act indirectly on the velocity of moving objects) and because as soon as a coherent set has been put in place the interactions between each elements of gameplay happen autonomously.
To convey the sense of an inescapable circumstance, I drew inspiration from the Erlkönig for trumpet in B flat major, narrator and piano, by Michael T. OTTO. Although not directly related to the idea quoted by the Commonplace Book, the mythology of the Erlkönig carries a universe from which I could draw a strong graphic principle of shadows, both simple and adapted in the very short development cycle imposed by the TigSource competition.
Color mockup for the parallax scrolling background.
Mockups for a level design, using more or less complex shapes. Each type of brick is driven by the physics engine.
Walk cycle for the main character.
Early game prototype.
The game is playable, even though it contains one level only. The player can only control some of the blocks, by clicking on them, hence clearing the path upfront the path of the narrator.
