Incubo

This was the first video game project of the Digital Bros Game Academy game design course.

The brief was to make a 2.5D game about the "8th wonder". After the brainstorming we decided to treat the 8th wonder as abstract entity rather than a phisical one. At the end we decided to treat it as an obsession of Hellen, the main character of the game: an old architect fallen into madness because of her obsession about building the 8th wonder.

The game is a Shoot 'Em Up. Since the game is set up in a nightmare we wanted Hellen to fly and fight against her madness and fears. The game is divided in various stages and each stage is a phase of Hellen's life portatraied by a an animated background.

The game is “semi-procedural”: we built a tool that spawns chunks of trajectories from a pool. Each chunk contains a set of trajectories that we manually built before and has a fixed duration: this way we can spawn each chunk without worrying about “blank spaces” or overlapping trajectories. Chunks are also grouped as a set of difficulties so that we can guarantee a good player progression through the game by setting how many easy, medium, or hard chunks need to be spawned and when. With this method we can also have the advantage of choosing the duration of each level and guarantee good replayability: every time you play, the game results different, avoiding the player getting bored.