Occult is a game concept that I created during the Fall 2016 semester at SCAD for a 2D-focused game design class. All assets, except sound effects and music, were created by me. From start to finish, the game was created in 9 weeks.
The Movement System
The movement system goes for a "fun over realism" approach. The player can climb and hang on to every surface in the game indefinitely, which allows for a lot more freedom than in other conventional 2D platformers and allows for much more verticality to the levels. If I were to revisit this project I would make the collision more complex, to make it easier to deal with diagonal surfaces. My favorite feature of the movement system is the grappling hook, as it is a very simple addition to the system I had in place, yet extremely fun.
Animation
The animation in this game is something that I was extremely proud of. Due to the complexity of the movement system, I would need to create many different frame-by-frame animations. I opted to solve this problem by creating my characters in segments, then animating them limb by limb similar to bone animation. This resulted in extremely fluid animation and a smoother(at least for me) workflow. I was also able to add detail that wouldn't be able to be created frame by frame, such as the slides of guns moving back when fired, and reload animations with clips being removed and replaced. Animation is an important factor in this game as it adds to the fluidity of the movement, never making the player feel like the momentum of the game has stalled.
Environment
The environmental art of Occult took up the majority of its development, and while I'm first and foremost a programmer and designer, I got to exercise my artistic skills with this project. I tried my best to adhere to a color scheme and style. For the foreground, I used the Unity tile map feature, and for environmental assets, I created prefabricated assets such as houses, churches, and trees, and placed these onto parallax layers, in all there are 5 different parallax layers.