Ellisar
ROLE
Programmer - Gameplay Designer
DESCRIPTION
Explore a corrupted environment moving with your two transformations to help fix the disaster that almost ended life around your world. Ellisar is a third person contemplative exploration and adventure game.
DATE OF PUBLICATION
9 May 2022
GENRE
Adventure platformer
PLATFORM
Steam
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Designing and programming Player mechanics and balancing them.
- Designing and programming world systems and UI.
- Production work and team communication, including communication with outsourcing.
- Sound design and programming of player feedback.
PROGRAMMING
The code for the movement of Ellisar went through many, many iterations. Initially it was much more based on Unity's physics engine to help make it as realistic as possible. But after not much time, it was clear that this was not helping the gameplay. The testers were struggling to grasp the concept of a limited flight that was also realistic, so I had to make my own physics for it.
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Most of the calculations are based on a simplified system of opposing drag and lift forces, where the gravity is always pulling downwards as we needed the player to be landing every so often. After that, I added the control system that consists of a basic rotating ball that changes where "forward" is for the player. Pairing that with the drag-lift, it made looking up a job that required more energy (the use of a flap) to move forwards, and viceversa when looking down.
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With that system in place (and after a lot of retouching and balance), the puzzles and interactions could be implemented. The interaction system has a basic multilevel inheritance structure with all kinds of possibilities we needed. From just animations or sounds, to triggers that allowed player actions.
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There were many visual things that were done via code. The main character's idle and walking animations came to life when I added pulsation to its scaled hair, and the whartles (the whale-like creatures with shells) have a procedural head animation that, paired with their shouting and whining, helps with visualizing their pain and connection to the especies of our character. But the main effect that brings more magic to the world is the light. There are minerals that light up in the presence of the player, as well as the small sea angel creatures that accompany them throughout the gameplay also shine and turn off depending on whether or not you have a flap to use.
Ellisar's gameplay design and prototype started in April 2021, when my team and I decided to make a game about movement and transformations. After a 3 month prototype (playable here) and a lot of redesign, we ended up with just the main character and two transformations that ended up being only one. We also changed the main theme of the game and settled on an underwater adventure.
From the prototype we were clear in what we wanted: the transformation had to be flight-like. We loved the idea of implementing a satisfying but different flying experience. So I took some inspiration from the feather system in the indie game A Short Hike. Adding a limited amount of flaps was crucial to ensure I could force the player to rest, contemplate the scenery and make the world seem a lot larger (which was necessary given our artistic limitations as a team).
​One of the main aspects of the movement design is that I wanted to make the player feel like everytime they had to transform into one of the character's options, there was a new type of control, flow and movement experience.
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The original scope of the game was very much out of our hands with the tight schedule we were in at the time, so mid-development we had to sit down and cut back on some of the things we had planned. Things such as a jumping transformation that could stick to walls and could be used in combination with the flight, or how we structured the level design as a semi-backtrackable world. But with this restructuring, a lot of things were made easier and better.
Originally the player could regenerate flaps while on the air, but that caused a lot of problems to our level design and, in a lot of ways, we could not predict players' outcomes when flying. When the rescoping came, I toyed with the idea to make the flaps available only regenerate when on the ground. That made the game way more fun and the exploration much more satisfying, so we decided to keep it.
Having accessibility in my mind was definitely a huge part of the gameplay and, especially, control design. It helped me realize that the control to start the transformation was unnecessarily complicated and it constantly informed my balancing decisions. When deciding on a final control scheme, I designed it so there were as few buttons needed to be pressed as possible, with the option of changing them to one-handed controls for both left and right arms and total rebinding of the keys.
We also wanted to allow as many people as we could to play our game, so we decided to try and translate it into as many languages as we could, with the limitation of having no budget. We found people close to us willing to help and Ellisar is now translated into 13 languages.
