Phobia is a game created by team of 4 for an assignment in a Level Design class in the span of a month.
Role
Idea development, level designer, artist
Tools Used
Unity, Photoshop, Spine2D
Initial Ideas
For this assignment, we were tasked to create a game inspired by the film Aguirre the Wrath of God. My team got together to discuss ideas, and my idea about a game where you face your fears throughout life was chosen. The way I came up with level ideas and order was through creating thumbnails and thinking about what fears were most common at certain ages. I ended up with level 1 being centered around bugs, level 2 being about the dark, level 3 being about rejection, and level 4 being about death. After this, we were all tasked with doing our own level, and I chose level 3.
Level Design
My level had to do with the fear of rejection, so I decided to have it take place in a party with the main gameplay being moving around the party and talking to your love interest. There would be little platforming where the player needs to follow around her crush, and the main gameplay would be the visual novel-esque segments where players talk to their crush and depending on how they answer they get a good or bad outcome. To the right is our game overview presentation, our initial title for the game was Parasites.
Game Art
For this game, we wanted to have graphics inspired by the game Inside. I created the sprites for the player characters in photoshop, and sent the other sprites except, for the ones used in level 3, to my team members for rigging and animating in Spine2D, I did my own. I also created ending scenes for my level.
Challenges and Takeaways
As the first, fairly large game project I took on this was a bit intimidating since we had to base our game loosely off the movie Aguirre, the Wrath of God which isn't the most straightforward of movies. In the end, we were able to create a game that seemed fitting, and the levels were diverse and fun due to each individual member being in charge of one.