These aesthetic decisions and our artists' hard work and dedication to creating the massive content helped the game get noticed from a visual standpoint.ĭue to 2D pixel art, a short art pipeline, where our concept artist’s creations would be precisely what we saw in the game, provided excellent control over the game's final look and feel.įamily house and Mount Morta on the horizon. On top of that, advanced lighting techniques, post-process effects, and highly detailed and smooth animations made the game look different from other pixel art titles. Our visuals benefited from pixel art with high details and various color palettes for the backgrounds. This was the case for Children of Morta from the initial days until the launch of the game. Visuals are always the first requirement for being noticed. The Bergson Family 3 - Quality of the Pixel Art and Animations The Design Challenges of Children of Morta If you would like to read more about the design challenges we faced, check this detailed article written by our game and narrative designer, Hamid R. Saeedy: Specifying the game's vision initially, getting feedback on it, and then protecting that vision until the end worked really well in our experience. Hundreds of meetings and discussions were needed, and many ideas and solutions were thrown away in the process, but we were able to reach the destination we were aiming for. Our main goal was to create a cohesive experience where the narrative and gameplay supported each other. Furthermore, our main concern was to avoid ludo-narrative dissonance, and we paid careful attention to blend the emotional narrative elements with the gameplay systems properly. We spent a significant amount of time, making sure a story could be added to the roguelike game structure. The same two features were praised after the launch of the game. We knew that every other aspect of the game needed to support these two pillars. We knew we had to keep the two main pillars, an emotional game about a family and a story-based roguelike. These two elements proved to be interesting, based on early feedback. The challenge was adding a story to a roguelike. Our initial idea was to make a game about a family with a complete storyline in the roguelike genre. We had to learn its value along with the guardian family in the game, the Bergsons. Support is the central theme in the story of Children of Morta. When team members got stuck in their work and didn’t feel the progress, assisting others increased the morale and regained the team’s sense of purpose. The second, which is the more critical functionality, is the meaningful act of helping others. The first, which is the apparent functionality, is getting help from others to finish a task, technical or non-technical support. If I wanted to describe the team culture in one word, that would be "Supportive." Supporting team members is vital in two ways. Throughout this project, we learned that we, ourselves, needed to be a family to make Children of Morta. We had many ups and downs in the five-year development process however, the strong sense of meaning we found in the project enabled our team to bear the hard days and push the project forward every day. Children of Morta was the first large game project for many of the members. Our team was dedicated and passionate, but the most important feature was that they all found great purpose in making this game. Our project started with an initial team of five developers, and mid-way through the development, the core team size increased to 18.Īll creative projects depend heavily on the members' quality and how they can interact and work as a team. What Went Right 1 - A Cohesive and Supportive Team We hope sharing these points will be helpful for other developers. Reading game post-mortems has always been inspirational and educational for our team. This article will describe the main lessons we learned from the game's development process and a year post-launch. A year has passed since the launch of the game.
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