Akai Tsume
A small prototype modeled in Unity
Since I was a child, video games have been part of my life. At an early age, I realized that learning new skills became extremely satisfying if I acquired them through games. That’s why at some point in my life, I explored the fascinating world of video game development.
Conceptualization
The following words were used to generate a short story that would later become the initial foundation of the game:
“history, mythology, animals, environment, elements, food, places, insects, fan, plants”
Then, I gave it a less abstract meaning:
“The rich history and mythology of a world ruled by humanoid animals is the environment where elemental magic takes place. Resources such as food are found in scarce locations. The behavior of insects has changed radically, causing a broad political shift by using certain plants to create enormous constructions.”
With these ideas in mind, I proceeded to formalize a base story.
Story
This is a fantastic land where animal-like creatures learned to master elemental magic and lived in harmony for many years. However, the mysterious death of the insect queen led to a significant political change in society. The kingdom’s new policies went against the previously established harmony, and tensions escalated due to an ever-growing food shortage. Before the events escalated into war, the new queen made sure to capture a fox who held tactical information crucial to the conflict. Now, his execution is planned for before the next dawn, and it is your duty to rescue him by infiltrating the prison where he is held.
Scenario
For this game, I decided to use the map “The Labyrinth of a Thousand Turns” as inspiration, developed by “Eneko Menica,” who published it on blogspot, following the license guidelines described on the blog itself.
The idea is to visualize the map from an isometric angle. From this angle, it should be possible to see the player character and the most important elements of the map. There will be doors, boxes, grass, and spider webs scattered across the map so that the player can interact with these elements.
Characters
Characters are divided into three main categories: herbivores, carnivores, and insects. In general, playable characters must feed every so often; otherwise, their health will decrease and they will eventually die of hunger. All characters share basic actions:
- Walk
- Attack
- Eat However, each category has specific actions that will affect the game strategy.
Gameplay
The game is about infiltrating different zones. Enemies will increase in difficulty as players unlock more characters and abilities. The story presentation and character dialogue will follow a “Visual Novel” style, where a representative image of the talking characters will appear on the left or right side of the screen with a dialogue box at the bottom.
For the first mission, the player must infiltrate a prison to rescue the “gray fox” and obtain the information that the insect queen is trying to hide.
The game strategy depends on the selected character: if it’s a herbivore, the strategy will focus on stealth, but if a carnivore is chosen, the strategy must be more aggressive.
Additionally, characters must eat periodically or they will starve. Carnivores can eat enemies, and herbivores can eat the plants in the area. There are as many edible herbs as there are enemies on the map, so choosing one or the other gives you approximately the same amount of time to complete the mission.
Gameplay
Although the project was never fully completed, I am sharing the prototype gameplay built during a month of work some time ago.
The screenshots, diagrams, and videos in this article were created by fedogamer. Additional resources from Unity.com.