Project Postmortem

Amusia

Amusia is a 2D Metroidvania with tight-knit and fast-paced movement. You play as someone who hates music and stumbles across a fantastical world of classical music. He aims to destroy this world by stealing its cores. Your task is to explore and find these cores while defending yourself against its inhabitants. The core gameplay is influenced by Hollow Knight, with branching paths and intricate level design. You will traverse various hand-drawn environments with the game’s fluid movement system. These tight-knit and momentous movement mechanics are inspired by Celeste and Titanfall 2. 

This is a project that has been in the works since the beginning of Summer 2023. The plan is to turn the project into a full-fledged game and work on it with every given opportunity within classes. That is why our team decided to work on this project for CMPM 125.

The Plan

One of the first challenges our team faced was bending the gameplay and premise of Amusia to match the prompt we were given. While the world of Amusia is set in the same place, the prompt we were given is situated in a pocket-sized galaxy. This implies that there are multiple planets you can traverse to. To match the prompt, we divided the different areas of Amusia into different planets. This allows us to retain the Metroidvania aspect of the game.

Since the base project does not have the main premise interwoven into the project yet, we were able to easily tweak the story to match the setting of the prompt. The story is that the girl who gives you the pocket-sized galaxy is mean and has trapped you in this galaxy. Your task is to find the galaxy’s core and destroy it so that you can escape.

Scope

Amusia is also supposed to have lots of emphasis on its fast paced and challenging combat system. However, we removed the combat aspect in order to abate the scope of this project and decided to only gamify the movement aspect. This gave room to focus on level design and asset design. Furthermore, while the game has a wide variety of areas, we limited the game’s size to just 3 planets, each with their own movement level puzzles and challenges.

To keep the game engaging, we added a 4th planet that cannot be traveled to throughout most of the game. The player may exit planets and travel to other planets at any time as long as they are at a rest point. The vast freedom may cause confusion and lack a sense of direction. With this 4th mysterious planet, the player now has a goal to work towards.

The Tasks

Since most of the core mechanics were implemented, the majority of our team worked on designing levels. Ivan coded logic for traversing between planets and respawning after falling into spikes or a ditch. He also did the level design for the platforming in the meadows planet. Josh was responsible for drawing some of the planet art as well as level design for the Bach Caves planet. He also drew assets for the platforms in the Bach Caves planet. Sofia was tasked with drawing some of the other planets and designing the platform and art for the Forest planet. Kat was attempting to create a bot that could detect the rhythm, mood and pulse of classical music used in the background of the game. Lastly, I coded the save and load system with help from my roommate, and turned the different skills and abilities into unlockables. I also added gliding mechanics to the existing movement system and designed the map of the game.

The Good and Bad

Thanks to the head start we were given from working on the project over the summer, we had a lot to work with. The movement system was complete enough to be playable. The backgrounds were drawn already. The assets that we did not have can be easily copied and referenced from the existing art. We also had a solid and finalized plan for the map of the game that we could work with. Each team member cared about the project, and were cooperative.

Despite the project being reasonably scoped, most members of our team were very busy with other projects and responsibilities. As a result, we weren't able to dedicate as much time into the project. We had most of the pieces of the core mechanics of the game working properly, but we had very little time to actually put things together. As a result, the end product is filled with platforms with art, and lots of holes and bugs in the progression of the game.

The Future

To improve, we would like to start on the project earlier than we were able to and squeeze whatever freetime we had to add more content to the game. The map could’ve been made a bit smaller to bring the scope even lower. Finally, we would also like to improve our skills in using Github to avoid merge conflicts and other time-wasting issues.

If we had an extra week to develop the game,we would add extra art assets for the platforming and level backgrounds. The saving and loading, and unlockables, systems of the game would be more well organized and systematic. A tutorial system would have also been added. We could also polish the menus, and patch holes and bugs in our game. Additionally, and most importantly, we would also double check that things are working properly and also playtest the game.

Conclusion

Despite the setbacks we had that resulted in an uncompleted game, our team made good progress to the overall vision of Amusia. More has been added to the core mechanics of the game, such as the flight, saving and loading, and unlockable systems. Our team is also now more experienced with level design and have a better idea of how to implement it in the editor. We learned a lot and found more things that need to be learned and improved upon.