Overview

Path of Sacrifice is a 2D platform adventure game that follows the journey of Hermod to save his brother Baldr from Helheim.

I pitched this game for the Video game Design and Programming class and it was one of the 20 games chosen by students vote to be implemented during the three months of the course.

The goal was to propose an experimental game, which in this case consists of having a reverse progression for player skill through the game. The player starts gaining the skills during the tutorial and then at each level they progressively lose one of them. The idea was to make the player find new strategies to overcome the obstacles. The game was highly appreciated by other students and was rated with full grade, ending up being one of the best of the course.

Some of my contributions:

• Pitched the game

• Directed a team of 4 other people including 3 programmers and 1 artist.

• Scheduled activities following given milestones and deadlines.

• Worked on the game narrative design and dialogues.

• Designed all levels in the game.

• Gameplay scripting (Data saving, Checkpoint system, Dash movement, and others).

Post-Mortem

Looking back to it, the game actually lacks from different points of view, first among all the platforming system. It doesn't feel as good to play as I wanted being inspired by great platformer games like Celeste, Mario, Super Meat Boy, etc... and this is due to many things we missed during the development from a design point of view, which can be resumed in two words: forgiveness and feedback... no coyote time, no jump buffering, no camera shakes, no gravity decreasing etc.

Plus I personally think the structure of the game and the skills should have been investigated more and other things could have been better.

But at the end, with the amount of time and experience we had, I am fairly happy with how it ended. As I said, it was considered by other students and the teacher as one of the best games, but most importantly it teached me many things about design, programming, teamwork, team direction and more.

Trailer

Gameplay Video

Links

Pitch

Gallery