Devlog 1 - Creative Brief

Escape Earth

Our Team

Elizabeth Switzer (Design/Team Lead)

Kiana Roomes (NPC Art)

Ollie Metropolis (Player Character Art)

Aaleyah Rojas Gatdula (Lead Programmer)

Aiden Cargnelli (Environment Art)

Game Pitch 

Escape Earth, is a stealth puzzle game where the player is an alien named Larry that has crashed on a distant future Earth overrun with cyborgs and is welcomed with nothing but hate. Larry now has to escape, by collecting various parts to a cyborg disguise so the player can successfully get through a highly guarded research facility. Each room contains different stealth mechanics, that eventually lead to our objective room, which contains an escape ship the cyborgs have stolen.

Mechanics

The player will explore through a side-scroller environment with objects like boxes and barrels scattered throughout allowing the player to hide in. In each new area, there will be a robot part to collect that the player's character will wear and it will trigger a new stealth-based minigame.  Essentially breaking the game into four sections for four pieces of a robot disguise.

- Robot hand/gloves: able to unlock the hand scanner; a timed puzzle minigame.

- Robot head: Allows the player to understand what the robots are saying, unlocking the ability to try a dialogue minigame when they are caught to escape.

- Robot legs/boots: allows the player to copy enemy movement through quick-time events.

- Robot backpack: Backpack that lets you use various tools to tamper with or repair electronics, but if you make mistakes you will alert the guards nearby.

Selling Point 

What makes Escape Earth unique is its main focus on stealth. There will be a stealth visibility bar that goes down when the player is in view of enemies. This is to replace the typical health bar that is a component of many games. It will allow the player to keep track of how much enemies have seen them to avoid being caught and losing. 

Similar Games and Inspirations

Our main inspirations for environments and the mechanics of the game are Rain World, Little Nightmares, and the Metroid games for their dreary industrial sci-fi themes. Metroid is also intended to be our main reference for the UI/UX designs. 

And since the design for the alien is meant to be almost opposite to the environment we are using similar designs in the Pikmin and Katamari games. Since their designs are much brighter and more playful. 

Early Concept Sketches

Early sketches of Larry the Alien are designed to be a cartoonish silly character. The design is intended to be reminiscent of Pikmin and Katamari character design. As well as typical cartoon alien designs which is included in other renditions. We chose to go with a cartoony look to contrast the more serious environment of earth and to make the character really stand out while you play them. Starting with looking for alternatives to the traditional alien design of a large head and eyes. Then deciding to continue with the large head but switch up the shape to have it unique but still easily recognizable as alien. Similar to Pikmin and Katamari they are both strange and unique designs that are cute while also feel sort of alien. It is important to keep the character design simple, to make room for the various upgrades that the player will put on throughout the game. 

This is the first concept of our spider-like robot design and we intend to have 2-3 different designs for enemies that vary in difficulty. 

Retextured Prototype 

This is a very early development prototype to show how we would re-texture a game-maker template. It includes early renditions of the player and NPC’s as placeholders. As well as assets taken from the game Rain World for the background since it has a very dark, run-down industrial aesthetic that we thought would be a good inspiration for the game.

Feedback

Our main piece of feedback was to scale down the game for the sake of time we have to work on it. The suggested approach would be to narrow down the five levels we have planned to two. Mainly as a way to have fewer environments that we have to design. This would allow us to fit more challenges into a level. With two levels, it was proposed that we could have the first be tutorial-esque and the second more dedicated to a small snapshot of the possible exploration. 

We also got feedback on scoping down the mechanics we include and start with developing one or two to get a sense of how long it takes and it can determine what parts of the game we have time for. Specifically, we can start with the helmet or gloves in our first prototypes. Then possibly moving on to other mechanics if the development of the first ones go quickly. There was a lot of positive reception on the character designs so we'll continue with what we have and make improvements as we go. 

Here is a link to our pitch deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12vx3oy9UPCmqlx3GC29RwW_9UoCyDpZHM1M2NDDM...