Of Night & Day

The day/night cycle has been implemented into the game in its base form, and with it comes a whole range of new possibilities:

• Plants that require sunlight to grow will only grow during the day.
• Certain consumables will only be available at night, encouraging the player to brave the dangers of night.
• Wildlife changes from day to night (switching between diurnal and nocturnal).
  • Dangerous wildlife will pervade more at night time whilst the neutral animals will be more elusive at night.
• Man’s perception of the world (and thus how it is portrayed to the player) becomes skewed by fear.
  • The further Man travels from his camp, the more intense the fear becomes.
• Fire maintenance throughout the night to drive away dangerous animals.

These are just a few of the possible mechanics for night time gameplay. The intention is to use Man’s primal psychological fear to create an alternate reality outside the safety of his camp, and take what is safe during the day and turn that sense of security on its head.

Completely off the topic of day/night cycles, here are some new art assets I’ve created for the game. Note the day/night ‘clock’ at the bottom left. As of now I’m using it for debug purposes, but if it proves useful in a gameplay sense I might leave it in.

Some new art assets.

What is Breeze?

Breeze is a small game project that I recently started working on. The initial idea was the brainchild of my friend Dean; he explained his dream game as one where you live a simple existence harvesting plants, herbs, and hunting animals to survive. The plants the player would be able to harvest serve a wide variety of purposes from medication to spiritual/shamanistic use.  The world of the game would be be subject to a full day/night cycle, a cycle of seasons, and also weather.

With this basket of ideas in mind, I wanted to take the simple abstraction of a hunter-gatherer game and inject a story into it, to make the concept float more soundly in terms of a game. Games such as Minecraft work reasonably well without a story because of the nature of the sandbox experience, but I felt that Breeze wouldn’t be sandbox enough to warrant being devoid of story. There will be no time restraints on the player in terms of pushing the story forward; at no point will progression be forced onto the player, rather they will have to progress the story themselves through their experimentation with the aforementioned spiritual/shamanistic plants.

The story centres around Man, a solitary hunter who is on a spiritual journey to solve the mystery of a dark force that has been harassing his tribe for many years. Man must survive alone in the midst of the Ocean of Trees, a sacred and haunting boreal forest that Man believes holds the answers to his questions. Through deep exploration of his inner spiritual self, Man will overcome that which haunts him and his tribe, and solve his own existential mystery.

The game is being developed for PC with Construct 2, as my strengths lie in art and design rather than programming.

Well Hello

This blog will chart the progress of Breeze, a small game project that I’m currently working on.

I’ll post a full description of the game tomorrow; for now though you can check out my portfolio:

http://thelightupwarrior.co.uk/