Energy Flow started off as a way to get our creative juices flowing. Me and a fellow programmer wanted to make something quickly. We wanted to make something that felt like it could be a slice of a complete game, within a very limited amount of time. We set out to create a game that was based around a one-click mechanic and gave ourselves one workday to make it. So we did. It was fun enough to work with for another day. Polishing, adding graphics and music. A very fun challenge! It ended up as a five level slice on IndieDB. Rough and unoptimized, but fun and challenging.
Specification: My Contributions: Tools:
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Studio: Arcscape Studios
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Student project: 2 Days
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Engine: Unity 3D
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Team size: 2
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1 Designer/Scripter
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1 Programmer
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Game design
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Level design & dressing
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Rapid prototyping
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Cinematic/trailer
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Unity 3D
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Adobe Photoshop
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Autodesk Maya
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Cinemachine
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Visual Studio (C#)
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Microsoft Word
Level & Game design
When designing the levels I took a quick look at some of the successful one-click runners on android. A similarity between these games was that all the levels were played on the horizontal axis. Not one of them used the vertical axis, except for when dying. So I set out to create the levels with verticality in mind. Since our character concept was a type of plane I wanted it to feel like your either was flying or climbing when going up or down.
I wanted the player to have a choice on some of the maps. On the one to the right, the player gets a quick overview of the entire map before landing. This results in them being able to choose which path they want to take. The reason a player would take a longer route is because score is based on the amount of pads the player manages to press. And if you manage to do it without dying, it multiplies per 6 pads.
When we had created the backbone for the game I added some juicy elements, like the particles, speedboost gates and shaky camera. I also worked with the post processing to create a more vaporwave-esque feeling.
After this I still felt like something more needed to juice the world up a bit. So I created a script that interpolates colours on the path the player flies on.
