A narrative platformer inspired by Journey, Hollow Knight and Limbo. The player guides a shaman through mysterious landscapes to discover the origins of his people and soothe lost souls. An end-of-bachelor vertical slice.
A narrative platformer inspired by Journey, Hollow Knight and Limbo. The player guides a shaman through mysterious landscapes to discover the origins of his people and soothe lost souls. An end-of-bachelor vertical slice.
↓ skip to deep diveEnd-of-year project : two months to build a vertical slice of a platformer with two game designers. Together with my teammate, we wanted to design a game with a strong narrative and environmental dimension.
We drew from Mesopotamian mythology on one hand, and Siberian shamanic traditions on the other, to build our worldbuilding.
Once the universe was set, I started a narrative development phase. Our conviction : a solid worldbuilding would let us treat this vertical slice as a fragment of a larger game rather than a school exercise.
We were committed to keeping coherence between universe and design objectives throughout the production. So we had to find the right balance, enough detail to support the vertical slice, not so much that we burned all our pre-production time.
In parallel, we laid the foundations of the 3Cs and imagined the gameplay elements. I then moved on to prototyping the mechanics and creating the first greyboxes for the level design, gradually integrating graphic assets and feedback from our supervisors.
The project’s challenges boiled down to three constraints : tight timing, small team, and learning the engine (Construct 3). Our answers : scope reduction wherever possible, embracing external resources rather than building everything in-house, and continuous playtesting.
Anuu is one of the first big projects I worked on. In hindsight, I’d change a lot of aspects, some gameplay elements lack relevance, the difficulty curve suffered from our misreading of what a good vertical slice is, and many bugs came from learning the engine and programming at the same time.
But it’s the project that gave me the foundations of organizing an ambitious production beyond a game jam, and many of the skills I use daily today come from there.
