Katherine Johnson Meets The Mongols (Indie Game Project)
Brief:
This project involved me creating a game based off of an random historical figure (in my case Katherine Johnson) and a chosen time period (Feudal Japan). There was also the limitation of a 640x360 resolution, a 32 colour palette and a max player sprite size of 64x64.
Game Concept:
With these limitations in hand, I came up with the concept of the player being Katherine Johnson and trapped in a simulation of the second Mongol invasion of Japan. The player then has to find rocket parts, while defending the coast from the invading Mongol fleet by firing miniature rockets at their ships.
Production:
The first stage was to create a game design document. A part of this involved making an initial layout of the levels.
After this I moved onto the initial previsualisation of the assets:
Katherine Johnson:
I then converted these sketches above into pixel art (ordered from 1 to 3)
Mongol Warriors:
After this I converted the sketches into pixel art (order 3 - 5):
Once this was done I moved onto creating sketches for objects and locations:
I then moved on to creating production versions of the sprites:
One of the standout assets I developed were the 8-way directional sprites for Katherine Johnson. This was my first attempt at making assets of this variety and I feel the end result is acceptable.
Another standout asset was Hojo Toikume, the NPC that instructs the player what to do. This was based primarily off of a single artistic rendering of him by Shikō Imamura:
Sketches:
Final Result:
Once this was done I also made the tilesets for the environment:
I also developed the audio for the game. The main tools I used were Jsfxr, BeepBox and Audacity.
Results:
Results:
This then led to the final product being put together. Gamemaker Studio 2 was the engine of choice, and I feel overall the outcome is quite good.
Game:
Walkthrough: