Vessel of the Grimoire
About the Game
Vessel of the Grimoire is a short interactive sidescroller game. It follows the story of a sentient Grimoire who wants nothing but to escape from its master's domain. To help itself escape, the Grimoire creates a vessel.
Players will play as the Vessel, a faceless entity whose only identity is the mask they have. The Grimoire will order the Vessel to acquire items for both you and the Grimoire's escape.
Explore the Grimoire's master's domain to find objects and solve puzzles to escape it once and for all.
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Game Engine
Design Process
Concepting
This project was my 3rd game assignment and my fourth game project that I did for university. It was also the final game assignment for my semester 1 of degree. For this task, I was given the option to choose between in making an interactive sidescroller, or an action platformer game. I decided to go for the interactive sidescroller as not only did I want to make a game that has a narrative background, but I also saw this to challenge myself to do something more as this would be my first game to have dialogues and interactions with the world. There will be other challenges when making this game as I am required to now also make my own art assets for everything rather that use an existing one online.
But starting off by planning the theme of the game. Originally, I wanted my game's theme to tie in with that of the Grim Reaper and there would be a narrative story around that said character. However, considering the fact that I would have to draw out the Grim Reaper and animate each and every part of its cloak, I decided against this theme. But I wanted my theme to still somewhat relate to darkness and horror and began thinking of ideas. Ultimately inspired by the fantastical and dark elements of Warframe and BG3, I narrowed down my theme to relate to that of dark supernatural fantasy.
Pre-Production
Once I had the themed narrowed down, it became clear for what I had to do. And so I started working on the unique interactions I would have in this game.
Since it was a simple interactive sidescroller game, I didn't want my game to have too many interactive options. I settled for 3 unique interaction keys: interact, collect, use magic.
Throughout the game, only the first 2 are able to be used in any levels. I purposely decided that the "use magic" interaction would be saved for later once the story has progressed further.
I also decided that if I ever had a bit of time, I would add a small fun easter egg in he game, a challenge I gave to myself as a quirky side activity for players to do within the game.
It was also here where I planned out the blockouts for at least 2 levels for this game. Techincally my second time doing blockouts, it was a challenge for me as I wasn't too sure how to explain it in a way where others could understand, based on the feedback from my lecturer. That is something that I will take into account for the future.
Game Mechanics
Unique Interactions:
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Interact: A very simple interaction mechanic. By pressing "E", players can interact with objects and NPCs in their surrounding environment. Interacting with objects will generate prompts or affect the game in unique ways, often times involving the animation being changed or an item being collected from that said object. Interacting with NPCs will trigger dialogue boxes for that said NPC.
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Collect: Another very simple interaction mechanic. Pressing "X" will allow players to collect items that are visible in the game. Said items are often small, but big enough to be visible in the player's eyes.
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Use magic: An interaction mechanic that is tied with the story progression of the game. Pressing "Q" will allow players to cast magic. In corresponding with the game, the usage of casting magic only works when interacted with certain magical objects in the game. This magic objects either transports the player elsewhere or gives the player magical items.
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Interactive Objects:
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These objects are meant to be interacted with when a certain key is pressed while collided.
Production
In this stage, I began designing my assets and started coding in Stencyl.
This stage was the most time consuming as I had to draw and code everything from scratch, which was a big challenge and new challenge for me.
I first started of with the art assets for my characters. While developing the characters, I spent an awful long amount of time drawing the animations for my characters as my main character had at least over a 100 frames of animation.
Due to poor time management also, I ended up rushing my character sprite sheets and ended up with some sleepless nights. A mistake which I corrected when I did drew my tilesets for this game.
Once I finished up with the art assets, I started to code my game. I had a few references thanks to my lecturer making a similar game that was also a sidescroller. So coding the game wasn't that difficult. Although I did run into a few problems, a lot of those problems were minor problems that involved me forgetting to put an attribute on either my characters or objects.
As for the major problems, the first issue was with the region feature of Stencyl. It was originally working as intended at first, but then it suddenly stopped working the moment I changed the region size. Even after I reverted the size of the region, it would still not work. After consulting my lecturer, we both couldn’t identify the problem. So I decided to consult with my seniors about this issue and the advice that I was given was to never use the region feature in Stencyl and instead to have the game check the coordinates of my player. Since that would require me to calculate the coordinates of the game and since it would take me a while to do that also, I decided to hold off that problem and solve it later.
But ultimately, I decided to scrap this feature and implement the assets that were supposed to appear in the region in a different way, that way being that it already appear within the game itself.
After I finished coding the game, I added the necessary sound files needed for my game. I then worked on the cutscenes and while working on it, I figured out a smart way to put in an easter egg into the game which relates to the type of cutscene a player would get in the end.
Audio used in this game was all free audio found online. Credits to where I obtained my audio files will be listen below.
Game Screenshots
Asset Credits: Click Here