Avarice

You wake from petrification and the world you knew is gone. All you have is what you learned as an adventurer, so you set out into a world that has moved on, to find what is left of the past and the truth behind the disappearance of your kind.

Avarice is a top down campaign where the ending is foreshadowed by music and interactions. It is a story of a bitter situation brought about by the folly of mankind, and our main character has to suffer for it. He is the last human left and the one who can find out how it all fell apart, and the game is named after mankind’s sin, not his. And yet, with his companions of old leaving and new ones to take their place, even in an unfamiliar world, he seeks the truth.

The world he wakes into is one where the elves and beastmen have to live on floating islands now, to keep away from the monsters on the ground, and there are no humans anymore.

How I made it

I made it at DigiPen Bilbao, in the third trimester of my second year, alone, in 1.5 weeks. It is design mixed with writing: I wrote the full story and the experience draft, charted the intensity of the progression and the interactions between the sub goals, and built the map in RPG Map Maker. The explanation pictures were made in Figma and labelled in Photoshop. The art isn’t mine: it comes from free online sources, some I paid for, and the default tiles that come with the software.

For this project I was told to reuse an old project, so I took the fisherman’s home from WFH 1 and made it the protagonist’s home. It was never designed to be his, but he is a man who lives quietly as a fisherman on the shore now, so it fit.

Design intent: the ending is foreshadowed by the music. After the first monster he kills, a faint, haunting melody plays, and it seems like just a musical cue. It plays again when another monster he is fighting dies, a little more prominent, and after the fight with the villain it doesn’t play at all. The player registers it without understanding it, and what it means is held back until the final chapter.

What went wrong

Writing the story took the longest. What went wrong was that I underestimated the workload of a full story on top of the level design. I wanted to make a map with several levels of elevation, but I had to be content with this one.

The grade

The grade was 93. This is what I was told:

“The context and setting are unique and interesting. The main objective is easy to connect with, as that is what players should want to do too in that context, and it is also compelling. The subobjectives are coherent and lead well to the main objective. The key interaction events are good, and the pacing curve is excellent. The distribution of resources is fine although I wish it had more depth. The experience draft and full story are great. The map is fine both from a high-level perspective and a low-level perspective, although it’s quite empty.”

Looking back

I would definitely have started even earlier, but also made a sketch or whitebox of how the level could look before writing the story, so I had a rough idea of what I had to work with given the space. If I had done that, I think I would also have known how little time I had.