GENRE: A survival / strategy game featuring puzzles, in-depth lore, and adventure!
Meet Team Barra
Producer: Michelangelo Bedetti
Designers: Michelangelo Bedetti, Matthew Jenkins, Wayne Yiqun Guo, Courtney Spivey
Artists: Matthew Jenkins, Courtney Spivey
Programmers: Robin Couwenberg, Heather Cochrane
Overview and Summary of Device Considerations, Brief, and Storyline of Game
BORE was the result of a semester long project at the University of Abertay. We were told to create a god game and had full creative control of how it looked, worked and felt. After a few initial pitch ideas, we went with Matthew's ideas of a dystopian mining game, where the objective was to discover caves and dig to the bottom. The targeted audience was Everyone, although there were some darker themes to be explored in the game later on, most of it was not implemented so it was suitable for all ages & demographics. We went with mobile development first, and have also created a PC version. The mobile version utilized more touch feedback and we wanted to cater specifically for phones first, so the experiences are slightly different.
BORE begins with the escape of our main characters from the toxic wasteland above ground to the unknown depths below. As Earth's atmosphere crumbled, so did its civilizations. Knowledge of technology dimmed, people began to worship beings from ancient myths, and many credited useful tools to their mythical creations. Driven by a desire to survive and one day perhaps to return to the surface, the inhabitants of BORE burrow deeper and deeper beneath the earth's surface, discovering caves, mysteries, and the truth of their humanity.
Title Screen
Responsibilities as 2D UI & Character Artist and Content Designer (character script, tutorial lore, game mechanics)
As UI artist/designer, I created the User Interface for our game and helped with UX. I also created the layout of the minigames. My first round of UI screens did not make it into the final submission. A week before our project went into Alpha, our mentors pointed out that they could tell which artist drew what assets because of stylistic differences and the usage of different color palettes. Matthew and I had the same ideas and concepts in mind, but our executions were always different. Because of that, I redesigned every aspect of the UI and many aspects of UX.
I also did not have experience as a game designer at this point, so user experience, gameplay mechanics, and pacing were things I did not know how to do at the beginning. Throughout the semester the other designers and I worked on being game designers together and helped each other out with this issue. I was definitely not the only designer. As the semester went on, I added an ‘eating’ scene at the end of each day, an ‘end of day summary’ screen displaying the gains and losses of each player, and adding a visual transition from the wireframe map to the caves were all ideas I brought up in order to better pace the game. As for User Experience, adding a confirmation panel asking players to confirm an action before said action took place in the most ill paced part of our game helped slow down the actions that occurred.
Because of my generalist perspective, I knew when most things were implementable and when things were too far fetched to be done from programming, art, and narrative perspectives, which was helpful in keeping the game manageable.
The first version of UI. We didn't use any of this because it felt too different from other aspects of the game.
Revised version. Things are coming together.
Other aspects of the art that changed: The cutscenes were redrawn, the characters were redesigned to be more practical and expressive.
The two versions of our in game main characters. They've changed a lot!
