Yokai Ascension

Level / Game / Narrative Designer & Producer

Pitch

a traditional japanese inspired Rogue-Like Game in 2D pixel art. Play as a young girl as she inherits her family's haunted "Ryokan" where she must battle her way to the top, fighting malicious japanese spirits (Yokai) along the way up in an attempt to get it running again. However, everytime she tries, the building's layout changes.

This game features much environmental storytelling, evolving npc story and interactions, combat mechanics and a boss level at the end.

Platform: PC

Controls: Gamepad / Keyboard

Players: 1 (Solo)

Engine: Unity

Dev Start: September 2020

Dev End: January 2021 (4 Months)

Rogue-Like

Summer Dev Start: July 2021

Summer Dev End: September 2021 (2 Months)

Accomplishments

Created Procedural Generated levels inspired by traditional Japanese rooms.
Acted as project manager and lead the team.
Worked on many different aspects (GD, Levels, Programming, etc)
Worked on lore and evolving storytelling.
Designed enemies based on japanese folklore.
Pushed this project further by working on it during the summer.

Learn More

Worked on this project as a Level/Game/Narrative designer in a team of 5 people. I also was the producer and helped as a programmer. This project was a school project but was continued after it was done for a duration of 2 months. The team grew to 10 people as we recruited several artists and designers to help us add more content to this game.

Capture_decran_2021-07-06_a_17.45.34.png

About The Game

Fight - Climb - Search - Repeat

Being a rogue-like game, the aim of the game is to reach the highest level and beat the boss in a single run. The levels are seperated in floors that get harder the higher the player gets. Each 2 floors has different environments, add more variety of enemies and are larger. At each floor, the player must navigate the different rooms in order to find the key room(s) that open the door allowing to climb to the next floor. At the top, a boss fight awaits the player.

A shop is available at each floor and once the player dies, they end up in the main lobby (hub).

Evolving Levels

Despite having many roles in the project, most of my time was spent working on making rooms. There are 30+ different rooms that the player may randomly find themselves upon as they explore our ryokan. Each rooms has 2-5 variants that also randomly get chosen upon spawning that offer variety in decor / obstacles and enemies spawn locations and patterns and overall difficulty.

This ensures that on each run, you are always bound to have a different experience as you fight your way up.

My Part

Designed the 3Cs of the game and the main character mechanics.
Designed and produced 30+ levels with 2-5 variants each making a total of more than 150 "different" rooms.
Integrated many of the animations in the engine.
Wrote the story-line of the game, designed npcs/dialogues and environmental storytelling.
Programmed several systems in C# most notably elements that were linked to the level (randomizes, the shops, level progression etc..)
Managed at team of 10 developers.

Development

My Experience

I really enjoyed working on this project. This is probably one of the projects i'm proudest of and one of my favorites. During this project I had many different roles as the development team was very small. As such I was able to do many things and learn a lot from it (from level design to programming to managing).

This also made sure I was fully invested in the project as we had to keep going forward as a team in order to achieve what we set out to do. This project most notably allowed me to experiment more with Level Design as the "procedural generation" was required. It made me think outside the box on how to create my levels.

This project was appreciated by the whole team and pushed us to continue the project months later during our summer break. We recruited new developers that really helped us add a lot to the game. This project was also the first time I managed a team, starting with 5 people and finishing with 10, it was a really educational experience.