Design Principals
• Retro Feeling: The major design philosophy for this project was recreating the retro feeling of the early FPS games. The game ignores modern design principles in order to be true to the classics. For example, the game doesn't use traditional WASD controls, but instead the player has to move their mouse in order to move. This retro feelings is what drove the level design, art, and mechanics.
• Magic Spells: The entire gameplay revolves around this system. The three different spells, Lightning Bolt, Flame, and Poppy Blast, all have different feelings and uses. For example, the Poppy Blast is based on a shotgun so it has higher damage when up close to an enemy. Each spell is also more effective towards one of the three enemies. Flame does double damage to Scarecrows, Lightning Bolt for Tin-Men, and Poppy Blast for the Lions. There are also three secret spells you can unlock in the game.
AI Design
• Scarecrow: The Scarecrow had very limited movement only being able to move between four different positions. This is to make the Scarecrows look very dimwitted to match the "has no brain" concept from The Wizard of Oz. The Scarecrows shoot same poppy blast that the player has which makes it dangerous for the player to get too close to them.
• Tin-Man: Tin-Men randomly roam around a certain radius from their spawn point. Once they see the player they have a seventy percentage change to throw their ax at the player, or a thirty percentage chance to charge at the player with a melee attack. This forces the player to stay on their toes every time they see a Tin-Man. The Tin-Men also react if they player gets to close to them, and will start doing melee attacks.
• Lion: Lions are very simplistic in design since it is based on a wild animal. If the Lions see they player they immediately charge at the player then attack them when in range. They act as the most immediate threat to the player, and need to be dealt with quickly.
The game takes place inside of the Witch's castle during a raid from her enemies. The halls and corridors are full of the different enemies and traps. The levels were designed to simulate the retro feel by having no curves or organic shapes. The first level is very linear to act as a simple introduction to the game and its mechanics. The second level gives the player more agency by givinging them two different paths to choose from. The third level is a open battle arena where the player has to kill a certain number of enemies in order to finally escape.
I created the pixel art was by using a free open source Javascript library called Pixel It. It takes a image and converts into a pixelated asset. I could change the pixel block size to control the level of detail of each asset. For consistency, I would usually stay in between 20 and 25 pixels depending on the photo. There is also a palette system that converts the pixelated photo to match a more 16-bit art style. It comes with a variety of premade palettes, but I also added custom ones to get the look I wanted.
While the outputs from the Pixel It looked pretty good, I would make final tweaks to the shape or color using Adobe Illustrator.
Below are some featured assets from the project.
