If you have ever felt as if all your work you have had to get to where you are lacked a sense of home, then this game could resonate with you!
Find your way through the pieces of a certain Viking's past in this top-down puzzle story, where in each level you will be able to arrange a series of components in order to remember your homeland's melodies.
In Yggdrasil you play as a witty Viking seeking to recount memories of their homeland, while they follow their mighty raid chief on a quest for new lands, which may or may not lead you to your presumably ultimate goal of attaining a place in Valhalla.
This week on Yggdrasil development
Hello! Welcome everyone! Today I will tell you about the first week on the development of our upcoming game.
Firstly, since this is Yggdrasil's first log I would like to introduce our team to you!
It is composed of four members, each with their unique role. We are:
Game Artist - Catarina Fuscaliuc
Game Developer - Ivan Emídio
Game Designer - Izadora Chiamulera
Project Manager - Mariana Martins
Our initial idea for this project, was to create a puzzle game, as we know based off of Immigrant song, that used the actual music in its puzzles(or at least it's narrative). With this we mean that we want to use the iconic riffs that the song loves so much to give life to our game, as well as it's lyrics in order to actually write a story.
This would work by the player arranging some items(each with their unique sound) to play the riff tune connected to each level or part of the story.
This means that the mechanic with which the player plays the final song should be somehow timed(to avoid the player randomly getting the correct tune.)
For this week we have set a narrative structure based off of how we think would allow us to do as much as we can efficiently in the short time we have, while also utilizing the whole song.
So here we can see we have a whole of three puzzle levels(healing bit is a different kind of gameplay) highlighted in green. For each level we will have one cutscene placed in the specified scene in the previous table. Also, the memory that each level awakes is stated, being related to the lyrics of the song as previously stated.
So this is how each Level should go according to our narrative:
Level 0: Begin on a boat -> cutscene for setting player expectations -> solve puzzle -> display dialog with refrain (cutscene)
Level 1: Begin on shore -> solve puzzle -> display dialog with verse 1 (cutscene)
Level 2: Begin on raid (fallen comrades everywhere) -> use previously acquired healing item on comrades -> display dialog with verse 2 (cutscene)
Level 3: Begin on village -> solve puzzle -> display dialog with verse 3 (cutscene)
Level 4: Begin on New land (other) -> solve puzzle -> display dialog with chorus (cutscene)
So based on this vision, we will need at least an inventory system, besides the future game mechanics for the puzzles that we are gonna set.
As for developing these ideas, we have started working on the main parts of the UI, such as the pause menu, having set a script that will be available in all the scenes with gameplay in GB studio.
As well as finished the template logo, and icons for the game, with the Main menu art and player sprites in work. This art will be the usual GB dimensions, 160x144 pixels, with backgrounds of 20x18 tiles, and sprites of 32 pixels. With that said the Character sprites will have two waling frames and one still for each side, kind of like this:
Other references we are taking include:
And finally our own menu buttons reference to be used by our Game Artist.
