About the creation : 

It’s a school project in group, made with Unity in C# and Fmod for sounds, in 3 months, in which we were ask to make a multiplatform 2D platformer.

For this project we were a group of 13 people, 4 Game design & programming (GDP), 2 Music & Soud Design (MS) and 7 Game Art (GA). This is the biggest project group I’ve had so far, so it was important to be in frequent communication and to plan the work of each one, so we used as tools: Discord, Google drive, Trello & Git for the game itself.

The concept of the game and the art direction came from the fact that the artists wanted to justify the 2D aspect of the game, so the cave painting aspect of the game was chosen. We wanted to use the cave paintings to tell a story, like the caveman and really involve the player in the story by taking him by the feelings. So, we chose as a character a young quadruped, an éterlou (the French name for a young chamois/ibex), the fact that he is young and alone having lost his herd is the result of the sentimental aspect wanted but the chamois/ibex side is explained by the gameplay. The GDP had a specification, as on every project, imposing the presence of certain features that we could choose from a list. So, we chose the wall jump and the stomp for the features concerning the character, one being a well-known chamois trait, pushed to its paroxysm and the other one a defense and intimidation gesture of some quadrupeds. We wanted to justify all our choices to create a plausible universe (because for example a chamois using lianas is less credible).

This was the first time I programmed the gameplay for a sentimental game, supporting a story, it’s another exercise than programming fast pace and dynamic games, and I really enjoyed this experience. In the project, on the programming side (the LD was shared between the GDP), I worked on everything related to LD bricks: the platforms, the objects, and their interactions with the character. For example, there are crates in the game under the appearance of rocks which have two states, a blocked state, and a released state. In its blocked state the player can stomp the ground to create a shockwave, an AOE, which will release the rock and once released, a stomp next to this rock, will throw it according to the logic of the AOE, i.e., the position of the player in relation to the rock and their distances. This mechanic is used in many puzzle parts of the game, often with one of my creations, the balance tree, where the solution is to put a rock on the tree to counterbalance it.

As you can read, I really enjoyed creating believable mechanics, playing with the physics to fit our character in his world, this was one of the compliments of the jury, they believed in our éterlou, intelligent, agile with vigor and weight. I couldn’t be more satisfied with the feedback I got on my work and on the game in general, I leave you with a quote from the feedback that the teacher of the GA gave us and that marked the spirit of the whole group: “It’s not just a game what you did, it’s more than that, it’s an ode to nature”.

Tips for the best experience :  

You can contemplate the landscape even more by pressing up or down on your keyboard or controller and if possible, play with a controller to be more conformable.  

Thanks for reading about this game, you can also try it on browser by clicking the button just below.

(if you have no sound when you click buttons on the menu and no music in game, refresh the page and click on the game window while the game is loading / Unity’s logo is visible)