This site is designed for desktop.
Mobile-friendly days ahead.
Yuna is a selfless traveller, giving to the point of foolishness. Join her on a journey as she attempts to save everyone she meets.
Do not let her lose everything.
0 CONTEXT
This project aimed to serve two purposes, creating a UX project and participating in Brackeys’ 5th game jam to get reviews from other players around the world.
Some of the approaches are taken purely for UX practice and may not be the best way to go about designing a game during a short game jam.
1 DESIGN CRITERIA
The game was designed around the following design criteria.
00 THEME
02 unique mechanicS
03 Playing with dimensions
2 THE INSPIRATION
During an anime session at 2am, I came across a small tale with a unique art style in Fruits Basket. The tale served as an inspiration for my next game.
In the original traveler’s tale, we hear the story of a selfless girl who derived happiness from helping others. Other traveler’s would trick her into giving them her belongings by pretending to be in need. Eventually the girl loses everything she has. At the end, she is tricked by demons into giving away her limbs and body. She dies happy and grateful to have helped so many.
I was inspired by the tale's ability to make the viewer feel heavy and feel love for the girl despite her foolishness. I wanted to recreate this feeling but also provide the character a fighting chance that makes her admirable.
MY TAKE
I started playing around with the idea of a fragile female lead, that starts out as foolish but grows to learn that helping others doesn’t have to come at a cost, and a lack of self-preservation would not only lead to her own ruin, but also render her incapable of helping as many as possible. The idea was to introduce an easy-to-implement mechanic that is engaging and communicates the message of working together to become stronger.
3 BRAINSTORMING
I joined the game jam with my friend Hammad Aamer, who served as secondary game developer and someone to bounce ideas with. The two main ideas that emerged were:
Introducing a companion character to fight with
Helping the enemies work together to become stronger.
At the end, we shortlisted notes and highlighted the ideas we liked in pink.
A cleaned up version of our session.
4 CONCEPT
We decided to go with the second concept of the main character helping other travelers work together to make trades. I sketched out a few concepts for the trading mechanism.
The gameplay was kept simple to encourage players to play the game till the end and complete the story instead of getting stuck in puzzles, getting impatient and moving on to the next game. In a jam that would get thousands of submissions, it was important to provide a quick and memorable experience.
I chose the camera view as a 2D platformer. This would enable me to form puzzles that look purely 2D, making the 3D view come as a surprise when it was introduced.
5 rESEARCH
The target users for this game were participants in Brackey’s game jam. Since they were all creating games, they would have access to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. A build would be required for Windows, Mac and Linux.
The game would be visible on the submission feed as a small thumbnail, this would require submitting it with a cover image that pops, preferably a gif.
I started researching games that involve solving puzzles in two dimensions. Quite a few games involved changing perspectives but few utilized different views as a means of solving puzzles or accomplishing a task. Two games that stood out as reference were Miegakure and Fez.
6 game design
The games design was inspired by:
Child of Light - Served as a reference for the main character and dialogs. Yuna was largely inspired by Aurora.
Hades - A unique rogue-like action game. Served as reference for story-telling and dialogs.
Katana Zero - A 2D action platformer that stands out in its ability to engage and immerse players in its world.
7 UNITY PROTOTYPES
At this stage, I set up a few prototypes in Unity consisting of basic objects to explore potential mechanics. The two main features I wanted to test were:
Trading Mechanism
2D to 3D Transition
The goal was to come up with a way to connect enemies for trades in 2D, in a way that utilizes their placement in 3D.
I came up with different prototypes and pitched them to friends for feedback on the core functionality.
8 VISUAL DESIGN
The visual design is heavily inspired by my first and only snow trip to Murree. The snowflakes against my sweater seemed to be snuggled against me and I new this was a feeling I wanted to recreate.
I researched different art styles to develop the right look and feel. Media that served as a primary reference was the tale of the foolish traveler in Fruits Basket, Gris, Sky: Children of the Light and Child of Light.
9 CHARACTER DESIGN
It was important that Yuna was easy to remember and talk about. The idea was to have her remembered as “the girl with flowing hair”. It would be enough for people to start a conversation and capture their attention. Yuna needed to have the potential to be instantly recognizable in a sea of games.
WHY YUNA
Yuna is a japanese name that means “Kindness”.
Now, I can pretend that this was completely intentional, but Yuna was just the first name that popped into my head!
10 CHALLENGES
01 PUZZLES IN 2D AND 3D
02 seamless transition
03 RENTENTION
04 RELAXATION
11 CONSTRAINTS
01 The travelers will be represented by cubes for simplicity.
02 Every traveler will have an interior color indicating what they have to give.
12 PROTOTYPES
