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Pawprints
Pawprints is a contemplative top down hypercasual game where you play a little girl trying to find her lost dog in a medieval-themed universe
This game was made during a Game Jam and the theme was "the prints". We had a small team of 2 Game Designers, 2 Game Programmers and 3 Game Artists. Here's what i did in this project :
Game design
As game designers, the biggest challenge was creating a game that was fun to explore knowing we were much closer of a walking simulator than anything else.
I proposed after hearing the pitch, inspired by Rime and Journey, to create a call mecanic where the player can see things appear in a radius detection during a short amount of time (like footprints of the dog). It was useful because it permitted to reveal other things like environnemental design and objects that explore the lore of the story.
The challenge of the footprints was to see how many distincts situations could i create, proposing different gameplays. We decided to separate the game in levels where each map has a season and mechanics that come with it. With the challenge of no defeat condition, the purpose of the use of the footprints for the player became the fear of getting lost in a big map. It helped us with our metrics to stimulate the memory, the curiosity and the the logic of thr players with only one game system.
concept of combat design situations
concept of pacing and tutorial situations
Level Design
After a scope down intended, we decided to reduce the levels and simplify all the complex mecanics to one big map evoluating during the two acts of the game. She was designed so the player could himself or lose the footprints of the dog, but would eventually find its way and just lose time. In another way, we would reward if the player followed signs by giving him objects that developped the lore.
The work of the level design got in correlation of the narration : we needed with just a little bit of context to understand the themes with the environnement. We adaptated the map by placing objects, references and tracing the way so that the player experience makes him discover little by little the lore and the plot twist of the game.
Narrative Design
concept of level 1
Spoiler alert : the intentions of the game was tot talk about war in a medieval context and the lost of someone you care, lsike a puppy. We decided first to create 4 levels, each one representing one of the 5 stages of grief. Unfortunately, it was too dense to create in 3 days and we decided to complete the lore of the hidden objects by a confrontation in two acts : the first act which is a dream, a warm summer day where the player thinks everything is okay and that his dog seems alive, and the second act, a cold return to reality in a winter night where you cannot see your dog and understand progressively the situation.
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