Exale (2D Sidescrolling Adventure)

Trailer

Details

Role: Game Designer, Mechanics Designer, UI/UX Designer, Narrative Designer, Artist

High Concept: In Exale, you explore a mysterious cavern area as Exa and Ela, 2 lost souls that have fused with each other. With the ability to blink/dash short distances, navigate the caverns and collect other lost souls to power a machine that can let you escape the cavern.

Awards awarded by Digipen

- Best Sophomore Game Finalist

- Best UI Design Finalist

Making of the game

Another challenging game to make, Exale is my first 2D game made on a custom engine, and my first game where i have worked with a tech team (previously i had a team with only 1 programmer).

The game was designed and developed alongside the custom engine, as the custom engine had to built from scratch by the tech team. This was an arduous process as the custom engine did not have all the capabilities that the game required from the get go, and there was a lot of iterations on how the game worked due to the evolution and constraints of the custom engine.

I worked on this project as mainly a mechanics designer, and i joined the project after the original team has thought of the main gameplay mechanics along with high concept. I looked through what they had, and started doing brainstorming with the team to further increase the engagement value of the game.

I took a teleportation mechanic that was mentioned in the original game concept, and decided to make that mechanic the main focus of the game, and built everything in the game around that teleportation. This made our game very recognizable and memorable within our cohort.

Having to work double roles

Due to the number of available artists in our cohort, not all of the teams that were formed had an artist, and our team was not able to get an artist to work with us, so i had to take up the majority of the art work due to my past education in game art.

Working double roles was tough, and balancing between working on the game design and game art really ate at my schedule. During this project, i tried to put my design work as a priority as game design is my passion, but i also had to make sure that the art was of a certain standard as i believe that the art in the game also plays a big role to the enjoyment of the player. I was also aware of how the art can really make the game design shine as well.

While it was tough to do game design and art work at the same time, there was also a few positives that came with working on these 2 components of the game. Firstly, i was able to tailor the art to fit the game design perfectly, for example, placing the pivots are on the animation spritesheet to help with scripting the behaviour of the game objects. Secondly, it allowed me to learn in-depth about the workflow between an game artist and a game designer.

Game Demo

The game is available on the Digipen Game Gallery, feel free to download and try the game for yourself!

Link for Game Demo:

[ https://games.digipen.edu/games/exale ]