Game Concept Log
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Overview
Working Title: Cave Divin'
Concept Statement:
The call of adventure beckons you! Rescue your girlfriend by running, jumping, and parachuting your way through a labyrinth of wickedly evil caves, making sure to avoid the dastardly traps and mysterious ghouls.
This vibrant platformer juxtaposes a charming and light-hearted art style with dark imagery and ideas. Enjoy the responsive controls and interesting level design, but be careful, for many dark secrets lie beneath the surface… Strap on your parachute and dive in!
Genre: Platformer
Cave Divin' is a simple platformer as it involves the player character navigating their way through a series of crafted levels, making sure to avoid enemies and traverse environmental obstacles. The path is linear (ie. Player goes from ‘A' to ‘B'), and the player has full control of the character's movements. Making this control as fluid and ‘natural feeling' as possible is the main focus. These features are hallmarks of the platforming genre. The emphasis of this game is platforming, and the hook of the game being the parachuting ability adds to this focus. As such, this game does not meaningfully occupy any other genres and is a pure platformer at its core.
Concept Creation Process:
The concept creation process began by identifying a genre. With the time restrictions of the project considered, the platforming genre was chosen, as it is a tried and tested concept that has a timeless feel.
Now that the genre had been identified, the concept could be further developed using a subtractive design process. This philosophy was applied to the controls of the game, breaking it down to the most fundamental elements of player movement and focusing on clever level design to engage the player. This creates a more ‘pure' platforming experience that emphasizes skill over ‘one-off' gimmicks or power ups. Although those elements can be very enjoyable, the decision was made to take a more minimalist approach.
A clear example of this type of game design that inspired Cave Divin' is found in Super Meat Boy, a 2D platformer that showcases that combining robust player controls with intelligent level design is all you need for a fantastic platforming experience. An important component of Super Meat Boy that will be implemented in Cave Divin' is the instant respawn on death, which is crucial for the flow of the play experience, especially in difficult platformers.
Another game that inspired Cave Divin is Celeste, a 2D platformer that effectively uses subtractive design to draw in and engage the player with beautiful pixel art and responsive controls. An element that inspired Cave Divin' is the idea of having an interesting hook in the player movement. In Celeste this is the dash, which opens up a new realm of interesting level design in addition to giving the game a clearer identity. In the case of Cave Divin' the movement hook is the parachute ability, which aims to also achieve this result.
Thematically, Cave Divin' is inspired by Spelunky, a 2D platforming roguelike that involves the player traversing a series of randomly generated caves, diving deeper the further they progress. Cave Divin' is different at its gameplay core, featuring hand crafted levels as opposed to random generation, but the thematic premise and charming art style juxtaposed with brutal gameplay of Spelunky played a role in inspiring the overall aesthetic and concept of Cave Divin'. This game aims to achieve the same feeling of diving deeper into a cave system and feeling more trapped the further they progress.
Overall, the concept creation process was successful in creating a foundation on which to implement Cave Divin'.
Audience and Competitive Analysis:
The audience of this game is very broad, as platformers tend to appeal to a very large amount of people. This is evident by the performance of Super Mario Bros. (released in September 1985), as it is one of the most popular and well-recognized games of all time, having sold over 40 million units. Two major reasons for its success are the responsive and easily accessible controls, as well as the simple eye-catching art style. These are two factors that Cave Divin' aims to capture, and as such it could occupy a wide audience. This might be lowered because of the dark elements that the game possesses, but other games with a similar juxtaposition between art style and themes such as Undertale, which was hugely successful and became a pop culture phenomenon, show that this might not drastically affect audience response.
Younger audiences would be interested in this game because of the responsive controls and interesting yet challenging level design. The concept of the game is very simple to understand, and there are no learning or knowledge barriers that would prevent them from enjoying it from beginning to end.
Older audiences would also enjoy the universally appealing gameplay, but in addition they would be drawn in by the aesthetic style. Pixel art is very nostalgic and has a timeless feel to it, and the dark twist to the otherwise charming and unassuming art style provides an interesting spin that will leave the player engaged. This broadly appealing aesthetic style in addition to the simplicity and accessible nature of Cave Divin' would also make it appealing to both male and female audiences of all ages.
The game would also appeal to casual and hardcore gamers, as casual gamers can simply make their way through the game without too much trouble due to the accessible game design, while hardcore gamers can take the time to master the levels to achieve high scores from collecting all the treasure without dying and finishing the levels in a low time. This competitive aspect of the game increases its replay value and broad market appeal.
Game Treatment and Concept Art
You are a brave and foolhardy adventurer who never denies the call of adventure! Your girlfriend has been kidnapped by mysterious ghouls and is held captive deep within their caves. It's your job to save her from their evil clutches, so what are you waiting for? Strap on your trusty parachute and dive headfirst to her rescue!
Sprites for the player character. [Credits: original sprite sheet created by GrafxKid on OpenGameArt.org, but with hair added by me in Microsoft Paint]
Classic Hero | OpenGameArt.org
Sprite for the adventurer's girlfriend. [Credits: original sprite sheet created by GrafxKid on OpenGameArt.org, but very heavily modified by me in Microsoft Paint]
https://opengameart.org/content/bushly-and-princess-sera
Movement
As expected you can do all the usual platforming hero actions like running and jumping, but you also have access to a parachute that you can use an unlimited amount of times! The catch is you can only use it once before you touch the ground, so use it wisely. In general, humans can't survive falls from great heights, and neither can you! Your parachute is essential to get through the platforming challenges and avoid the enemy ghouls, so make sure you learn how to master it.
Traps
Beware of traps! You might be an awesome adventure, but just like the rest of us you're a squishy human, so make sure to avoid traps such as bloody spikes and lava pits. These traps will kill you faster than you can say 'ouch', so watch your step.
Sprite for the bloody spike trap, created by me in Microsoft Paint.
Enemies
Not only do you need to keep an eye out for deadly traps, but also the ancient and mysterious ghouls who will make your bones melt and blood evaporate on contact with them! There are transforming ghouls who seem harmless at first, but transform into horrifying and dangerous creatures who pursue you when you get close. There are also flying ghouls who will wander the caves and chase you down. Ghouls are best avoided, never confront these horrifying creatures head on!
Sprite sheet for the transforming ghoul, created by me in Microsoft Paint. This shows the ghoul in its unassuming idle form at the top, with the transformation stage below it and the final pursue form travelling left and right.
Checkpoints
Death is not eternal! By resting your soul at the definitely not evil blood altars, you can instantly respawn after a painful death! There's no limit to how many times you can restore your life, but you lose score every time you die, so be careful.
Blood altar sprite sheet, created by me in Microsoft Paint.
Treasure
The goal of your mission is to save your girlfriend, but why not get rich in the process? These ghouls may be disgusting creatures, but they sure do have good taste when it comes to treasure. Besides, they took stole it first, so you can take it guilt free!
Collect these items to add to your high score, which is calculated from level completion time and number of collected treasures, with each death reducing the total score.
Treasure sprites created by me in Microsoft Paint.
References
Fox. T. 2015. Undertale. Toby Fox [Online] Available at: https://undertale.com/ [Accessed 10/04/2021]
GrafxKid.2015.'Classic Hero'.OpenGameArt.org. Open Game Art [Online] Available at: Classic Hero | OpenGameArt.org [Accessed 31/03/2021]
GrafxKid.2015.'Bushly and Princess Sera'.OpenGameArt.org. Open Game Art [Online] Available at: https://opengameart.org/content/bushly-and-princess-sera [Accessed 10/04/2021]
Matt Makes Games. 2018. Celeste. Extremely OK Games [Online] Available at: http://www.celestegame.com/ [Accessed 10/04/2021]
Team Meat. 2010. Super Meat Boy. Team Meat [Online] Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/40800/Super_Meat_Boy/ {Accessed 10/04/2021]
Yaden, J. 2021.'The Bestselling Games of All Time'. Digitaltrends. [Online] Available at: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/bestselling-games-of-all-time/ [Accessed 10/04/2021]
Yu. D. 2008. Spelunky. MossMouth [Online] Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/239350/Spelunky/ [Accessed 10/04/2021]
So two weeks ago Tommy flew out to Santa Cruz to start working full time on meat boy, things are moving steadily for him, he currently has his engine running on the wii, but a few weeks back i hit a wall when it came to meat boys new updated look.His new design was super important, i wanted him to look fresh and updated for console, but i also wanted him to stay familiar enough that when people saw him they instantly knew he was that little low rez cube from the flash game they loved.
Heres the basic process of design from start to finish for the past month of development.
(scaled)
1. The original meat boy in all his low rez glory!
2. Trying basic updates, detailing and lighting, adding expression to his eyes, still looked too close to the original.
Super Meat Boy Online
3. Tried a new style, similar to the cartoony look of the concept images ive posted. i hated it, and more importantly its not a style that translates well when scaled down. its super important that meat boys graphics can be scaled up and down without looking strange when super tiny or very large, every thing has to translate well visually in all sizes. and this style was the worst for this.
4. Going 3d! well kinda. using the basic concept and adding a 3d cubist dimension to it, i thought this look would work well when meat boy would turn and run, so you could see he had depth to his shape. still looked too much like the original.
5. Adding details. at this point i was trying out an SNES approach to the retro look, i also played around with giving his arms/hands more detail. fingers and such. it was a bad idea and the details were a bit too small to see when scaled down.
At this point i was wracking my brain trying to come up with something that would give Meat boy a new updated look. i didn't have to look far for inspiration.
Danielles plush version was sitting next to me the whole time, there was something about the size of the eyes that was very appealing to me. I played with the eyes a bit, making them a lot larger and more child like. i was very happy with how this translated visually when scaled and it also have a more innocent look to meat boys expressions.
So using these new giant eyes, the 3d aspect of #4, the details of #6 and the mouth of the concept version Super Meat Boy was born!!!!
For the past week ive been playing with some of his core animations, without going into detail on everything ill just go ahead and post my sprite sheet so far.
So there you have it, meat boy is officially starting its 2nd month of development! woot! Ill be working on finalizing all his animations, and getting all the forest level tiles done by the end of the month.
Tommy and i will be attending GDC this year, and ill be speaking at the flash game summit on the 22nd. if you're attending either feel free to say hey! ill be the nude guy covered in meat.
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-Edmund