Developed in: 2007, 4th semester of Digital Games.

Platform: mobile phones.

What I did: Everything. Ideas, design, art, programming, marketing, QA...

Resume: An Indian is about to become a warrior in his tribe and to achieve this status he must face the challenge of climbing the Totemis (the biggest totem of the tribe).

Gameplay goals: To use few buttons, be attractive to female players and try to avoid the common cellular game stage standards where the character is in a static scenario that can be walked through using viewports. Usually the player can go left-right or up-down and just that. That's where the totem idea came up. A cylinder (totem) can be climbed up, and allows player movement around its 360 degrees. For me there's a huge difference between walking through a straight stage and walking through a round one.

Buttons: I don't really like playing on some mobile. Some buttons are hard to press and eventually you press a closer one by mistake. Having that in mind, the idea is to let the game do all the work it can and the let the player worry about the challenges themselves. So, the player can go left (1,4,7) and right (3,6,9) and the Indian is automatically always going up.

Description: As said before, the Indian is always climbing the totem up. This climb speed increases as the player progresses (slow to fast). The player has to move right and left to avoid obstacles and enemies. If there's a hit, the player loses one life. Each enemy (moving animals) has an exclusive way of moving around. Obstacles are static. There are also items with a variety of effects like making the Indian invincible, granting one more life, fogging the screen, increased movement speed and so on. At last, the chief of the tribe who is responsible for applying the test is always giving his opinion about what's happening. Sometimes the tips are good, sometimes he says something completely out of place. This will help the player to know the content of the game, explaining items functionality for example, and will also add some fun because of the weird speeches.

Tecnologies/Tools: J2ME CLDC 2.0, Eclipse 3.2, pixel art by windows paint =P.

Notes: The demo is in a very early stage. I had some trouble with the 360 degree rotation around the totem because it was possible to move infinitely towards a direction (left or right) and up. I ended up using 6 alternating viewports according to the movement done by the user and that screwed the native J2ME bounding box detection. Only way I found to fix that was allowing a brute collision detection (pixel x pixel). I lost quite a time on that and after it was ok I found out another critical problem: I needed to move the characters around the totem and move their bounding boxes as well. Their movement depended on 3 things: totem movement upwards, player movement (either left or right sides) and enemy movement (each enemy had one way of doing it). That was important because the player should be able to see an enemy, rotate 360 degrees and find it again, in it's new position. In the end, my demo is missing a lot: sync, enemy movement, RMS (game save), cutscenes (to tell the story), stage and menu structure (it only has 1 stage and when you reach the end, it stops there) among other stuff.

Other possibilities: After a Design doc is completed, a demo is running and we think a little bit more, we always come up with new ideas. Here are some:

1- Add multiplayer online mode where players will fight to see who lasts longer on the totem. Users would be able to kick the opponent towards a trap, enemy or something like that.

2- To include "animal spirit idols", items that would take the Indian to special levels. For example, after acquiring the eagle idol and finishing the current stage, the player would go to a spiritual world where he would be an eagle trying to collect some kind of item or reaching something (some knowledge maybe). Something like Sonic's chaos emeralds. More complexity? Yes. But way more entertaining. It's all about time availability for the project.

Return to Games