Overview
Child of Atlantis is a sidescrolling survival platformer with the goal of getting back to the City of Atlantis. This game was created for the Ludum Dare Jam–a game-making competition where groups have 48 hours to create a game from scratch within a given theme.
Team
Visual design, Animation, & UI: Me
Programming: Ashlyn Gadow (xnylhsa)
Level Design: Cameron Mozzetti (YC4)
Music: Caleb Varco (aDPyro)
requirements
“Deeper and Deeper” game theme
Original content
challenges
Prior to this project, I had not worked in a game pipeline so there were quite a few challenges including understanding Unity and the game-making process. One of the biggest challenges was creating the environment.
solution
This game utilizes a parallax environment of up to five layers and is designed to be monochromatic so that the character can be easily seen to avoid dangers.
process
The environment was built and cut into chunks that fit a single screen size where each layer of the parallax is separated into its own image. The naming of these images was extremely important since Ashlyn created a plugin that would read and place these chunks in the proper location based on X, Y, and Z coordinates for a proper parallax effect. All the graphics were created in Adobe Illustrator which came in handy when the images needed to be resized without losing quality.
Tools
Illustrator
Unity Game Engine
Learning Outcome
The tight deadline pushed me to create more than I anticipated–I learned I work well under pressure. In fact, our ambition was too high, to a fault, where we were trying to create a completed game in 48 hours when we should have created a more flushed out beginning of a game. The tileset could be improved so that each chunk isn’t a screen size; I’d likely go about this via pixel art for a game like this to utilize Unity’s ability to generate the platforms.
