Casualty

The Game

Casualty is a game I created for my Art Games class which is based off of a short animation. The idea was to use the provided video as inspiration and to create a game with a similar feeling and style that it provided.

Inspiration

Here’s a link to the animation I used to base Casualty off of:

Using movement and repetition

I took the movement and repetition as the main mechanic and focused on creating a simple quick game you might play for a few minutes to kill some time. Check out the gameplay video here:

Play Mode and Bounce

The player has only one goal, which is to grab the small objective mesh that floats randomly in space. After the object is grabbed, a copy of the player is made that constantly runs through his previous actions. If you hit any of your “past selves” you die and the game is over.

The game turned out to be fairly hard and a lot of my classmates really wanted a mode in which you didn’t die right away. So I added in a mode called “Bounce” in which players instead bounce off of their past selves and can only die by fading out completely. Another option would be to give the player’s a life system in which they can redo a round if they fail, but I ran out of time before I could implement it.

Player Fade

The player fade was created to take over for a timer I had previously on the HUD. When the timer reaches zero the player loses, this keeps players from staying still for too long, but they found that having a timer on the HUD was difficult to use. Many players that took their eyes off their current cube would lose track of it and end up dying. Integrating the timer into fading the player out helps bring tension up while keeping the player’s eyes on their current block.

Download the game here:

Casualty Prototype

Here’s a video of the Casualty Prototype, the initial test of the basic gameplay: