Description
A 3D grey box game where you attempt to save islands in the sky before they fall. Glide through the air, hit, drag and climb objects. Optionally, interact with the inhabitants to see how they cope with their fate if you are not fast enough to save them.
Program: Godot
Language: GDScript
University Project
Independent Project
Why Was This Created?
Falling Islands is a game created for a York University course: Game Mechanics.
The goal was to design and create a 3D greybox level in any 3D game engine. The design of the level and game were meant to employ game design concepts taught in the course such as: metrics, enclosure, pacing, navigation, wayfinding, challenge and teaching.
We were meant to take inspiration from a chapter in the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I chose the chapter Thin Cities 5, which described a city in the sky, hung with ropes between two mountains.
Biggest Challenge & What I Learned
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This was the first major 3D project I had ever worked on so I gained experience working with 3D aspects of game design and programming. The most important aspect to this was navigating the player within a 3D environment with the right feel.
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Often, new developers want to make the biggest game possible and I was no exception. This project taught me the lesson of proper scoping. The difference between the first and final documentation demonstrates the way that the game was scoped down. Both of these documentations can be seen below.
Game Design Documentations
Although the content has significantly changed (e.g., there are no time portals in the final game), the overall layout and positioning of the islands remains the same.
The following design documentations show the difference in the game's scope between the first concept and the final result.
First documentation contains: a greater vision of the game,
inspirations, early game mechanics, early narrative, map
design, flow diagram, and more.
Open PDF
Second documentation contains: systematic breakdown of
components, assets used, chronological order of development,
what was cut out in the final game, and more.
Open PDF
Download
Download here or on Itch.io.