Impulse64
GENRE: First Person Shooter
ROLE: Designer
ENGINE: Unreal Engine 5
YEAR: 2024
This was a solo design project created for university.
Our brief was to create a one-page design document that would fit under two different modifiers.
I chose "limited resources" and "backwards to victory."
My idea was to create a game designed similarly to old Commodore 64 games, focusing on replayability and minimalist assets.
The player heads through a level free of enemies, collecting resources in the "gathering phase", then activating the "escape phase" where they must backtrack through the level now populated with enemies, fighting with only the resources collected in the first phase.
The sprites stick to the C64 palette, and the audio was all created using a Commodore 64 emulator.
The simple graphical and audio style meant I could focus a lot more on the gameplay side of things.
This project helped me get used to working with one-page GDDs, even if the actual GDD produced for this project was a bit too wordy. I now know better practices for creating concise design documents- they require more images and less text.
How (not) to design a tutorial screen
When getting feedback on the game, I noticed a lot of people struggled with the main gameplay concepts.
To resolve it, I made... this.
This screen overly wordy, hard to look at, and overall a pretty bad way of communicating this information.
But it was a valuable learning experience.
I've learned to be way more concise when explaining how to play games. For later projects, I've learned to use less words and include screenshots to make much more readable help screens, and certain games, such as Dragon of Lysalkan, instead have the tutorial naturally integrated into gameplay
