IndieCade Hidden Heroes game jam submission
3rd place winner in hidden heroes game jam
My role on the project: Narrative/encounter/gameplay designer
This project was made in 48 hours as apart of the indiecade hidden heroes game jam where the purpose of the game is to highlight somebody that has been important to you in your life.
our team decided to make the game based around our game design professor david abzug
On this project I was responsible for the narrative of the game which includes:
- Voice lines
- Opening text sequence
- ending text sequence
- Discord messages
as a secondary to this I also was in charge of gameplay design as well as encounter design.
through this project we have a multitude of references to our professor that most people will not get, I encourage you to play the game or watch the above video before reading past this point
Everything below this is the references to david
Retro Doom Aesthetic - David lived through the eras of these nostalgic games and we wanted ours to represent that in its entirety.
Star wars and Diablo references - he is also a huge fan of these genres specifically and will often reference it during our classes
Tie Dye - David wears tie dye every day. Even if he has a formal event, he will wear a tie dye tie or socks. Throughout the game, there is tie dye, RGB, and other bright visual elements to represent this.
Mechs - in his time as a game designer, he has been affiliated with almost every mech game made in the last few decades and as such; we gave him his very own mech.
Club throwing - one of his favorite game mechanics is the throwing axe from God of War. We centered our game around this mechanic as it embodied the phrase "5 minutes of awesome is better than 30 minutes of mediocre). It's simple, yet can have so much use within it.
Evilition - he worked for the company Volition for many years and we warped it into our antagonist for the game. Volition wasn't bad to him, but we wanted some comically evil aspect of his life that wouldn't be overly serious.
Zavid Dabzug - The opposite of David as character. His core gimic is "turning invisible" by becoming green. This is a reference to a story from David's years as a game developer. A programmer on one of his teams gave the invisible characters a green material because he didn't have a completed shader for invisibility.
UI - in the menus you will hear David say "uh" and "well". These are actual voice lines recorded by him and we wanted it to feel as if he was thinking while interacting with each element.
Settings sounds - something we as students have consistently not done despite him telling us to is having sounds play after moving settings sliders. While unnecessary for a game jam, we knew we needed to have this feature in.
Discord - our capstone class has a discord, and each of the characters in this game are representations of people from the class.
Enemies - David constantly tells us to do the unexpected, and that's exactly what went into our enemy designs. The bug in the game are homages to computer bugs while the mouths are "crunchers" in reference to crunch culture.
David Abzug - every image of of him in our game is actually based on what he looks like. Funny enough, when he played our game, he was wearing the same tie dye shirt he has on in our cover image. David also voiced all voice lines of himself with my personal favorite being "Fuck, I left my mech in Peoria."
